Inside this shack, he slept on thin, dirty mattress on a rickety frame made of branches and he cooked on a smouldering fire, with chickens and dogs running freely around on the fetid dirt floor.
The labour-based economy in Nicaragua became clear on the first day, when our team spent a few hours at the brick factory helping to manufacture a batch of adobe bricks, which we would later use to build the house. Other than the hydraulic press that formed the bricks, the only other "technologies" available were shovels and rakes. All the tedious mixing of the clay, lime, cement and water was done on the ground, by hand.
That afternoon we travelled to the jobsite and began building the house. With some construction experience, I was given the job of being an assistant "albanil" (bricklayer) for the week. I was also given the nickname "chele" which I promptly misinterpreted to mean "boss" but soon found that it actually meant "blondie" or "whitie". For that error in judgement, I was rightly ridiculed by other members of the team!
Carlos was the real boss, the local professional bricklayer who had been hired to run the jobsite and who had a special talent for making do with what was at hand.
He only had a little english and I only had a little spanish, but we managed to communicate with a combination of stilted language and hand signals. It was a great learning experience, as well as a good exercise in patience, as I struggled to not make "suggestions" on how to do things better/differently. Because labour is the most readily-available resource, there are not strong incentives to mechanize. At the start, I had expected that we would easily finish the house, with our team of 9 volunteers, 3 habitat staff, and one professional. After a few days, it became apparent that was not going to happen. However, we did get the walls to about 75% of their finished height. And we did spend an afternoon visiting some of the houses that had been constructed by previous teams, so I was able to get a sense of the positive impact Habitat was making.
My time spent with the Habitat team concluded with a few days of R&R in Grenada, where we visited one of the many active volcanoes in Nicaragua and took a fantastic boat tour through Las Isletas on beautiful Lago de Nicaragua (Lake Nicaragua).
I spent another few days in the surf town of San Juan del Sur, on the southwestern coast of Nicaragua, before crossing the border into Costa Rica. I apologize that I don't have more/better pictures, but my camera decided to take an extended vacation from my vacation midway through my volunteer stint, so I only had my Iphone camera to work with after that.
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