El Limonal - Chinandega - Nicaragua - 2013

This last February, I made another venture with eMi to Chinandega, Nicagragua.  We had the opportunity to work with some of the same people at Food for the Hungry that we had worked with two years earlier.

On this trip, I had the wonderful opportunity to travel with my Dad.  He had always been interested in what we did on these projects, and it fit into his busy travel schedule, so he joined myself and Darryl, an engineer/surveyor from Lakeview, Or.

We got to stay in the same hotel that housed us back in 2011.  Here is a picture off the balcony at the hotel.  Yes, I could have reached out and touched the wires, no, I didn't try it.  In the town of Chinandega, there are A LOT of these three wheeled bikes.  The use them as taxis, or pickups.








Here is my Dad walking along the streets of El Limonal along with some of the community leaders (women) and a Nicaraguan doctor who works for Food for the Hungry.  His role is to try to help the communities understand personal hygiene affects them.  As we seek to bring new infrastructure into a community, if there isn't an appropriate level of education, then there is no benefit.






Here is Darryl making magic happen with the Total Station.  Darryl reminds me just how small our world is.  On both of my trips to Nicaragua I got to travel with him.  For those of you who have been following our family's wanderings across the States, you may recognize that Darryl was my boss when I worked for Anderson Engineering in Lakeview, Or.  He and I just happened to end up on the same eMi team in 2011.  We still work good together, so we teamed up again in 2013.  I look forward to more opportunities to work with Darryl in the future.

In El Limonal, it is hard to know where to start with the physical need.  The central purpose of our trip was to come up with a solution for this.  Gray water (see my post from Bayardo Arce) is allowed to flow on the dirt streets.  The problem here, is that the water is a breeding ground for quite the list of diseases.  In addition to that, on the day we were there it was about 90 degrees, with very high humidity.  Where do you think the kids hang out to cool off?

You guessed it!















Here is a picture of what an average home looks like in El Limonal.  Upper right corner of the picture is the house, center of the picture is the pit toilet, between the two is the out door kitchen area.  Bottom center is a hole in the ground where the gray water sits until it either infiltrates into the ground, or runs down the street.






It is hard to understand what life is like in El Limonal.  The community is situated next to the dump, cemetery and waste water lagoons for the City of Chinandega.  Each of these amenities are old, overused and under-maintained.  Many of the young men and boys in the community make a living for their families by digging in the dump for plastics and metals that they can sell to be recycled.

The photo below shows them standing in the out flow from the waste water lagoons to mine and clean off the debris in the dump.  In the center of the picture, you can just make out the concrete outfall structure where the edge of the dump used to be.  Beyond that is the river.

Recyclables are then hauled back to the town where they are sold.  A days work gets about $1.  At the end of the day, the workers rest on their hammocks and wait for the next day.


In the evenings, we would work on downloading data from the Total Station, and begin the process of designing a system to collect the waste water.

Here is one of the boys from the community that was very curious about why I had dug a hole in the ground, filled it with water, and just watched the water leave.  He thought the game was better when you caught lizards and threw them in the water.

So the infiltration test included slight displacement due to the addition and subtraction of lizards.

Darryl had a good helper as well.  I think we took a couple shots that might not be as accurate as we might want, but it was a lot of fun to see the joy that these kids experienced by being included in what we were doing.

Wow.  You made it to the bottom of the post.  Since you made it to the end, I suspect that you have the patience to hear some of my thoughts.  

As I think back on my time in El Limonal, I am struck once again at just how different our lives are from theirs.  As I write this, sitting in my temperature controlled office earning more money in an hour than some families in El Limonal are earning in a month so that I can maintain my house, my car, my security, my hobbies, my lifestyle; I am appalled.  I am appalled at how much of what I do, and what I am is centered on me.  And I ask the question "To what end? What do I hope to gain?".

As I seek to learn more of what it means to humble myself, to look not to my own interest and to have died with Christ, I pray that Galatians 2:20 would be evident in my life - "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God."