Ocatal, Nicaragua

Ocatal, Nicaragua.  9:50 pm, 8 March, 2009. We’re back. We have rejoined our friend, Roger Martinez, MD. He travelled with us from Managua and will spend the week with us in Ocatal and Cuje. Freddie and Bismark, our Budget Rental drivers are with us again as well. There are warm embraces all around as we recall the good work and friendships from last year.

It’s four and one-half hours up the Pan American Highway from Managua to Ocatal, and we stop just 13 miles south of Honduras. The road is winding and sometimes steep, crossing over dry creek beds and looking across the stunted vegetation of the semi-arid mountainous region near the west coast. It seems that my foot is pressing through the floor boards of the Toyota Prado I’m driving, trying desperately to keep up with the professional and experienced drivers of the other two vehicles.

The trip is punctuated by lunch in Paradise:  a restaurant-bar with a pool, stuck literally in an open field with chickens feeding nearby and a dog from the farm next door hoping for scraps. It is our recurring experience that eating together is not a custom supported in the restaurants we visit. Seemingly without regard for the chosen meal, one plate will arrive about 30 minutes after we order; that will be followed in 10 to 15 minutes by, perhaps, two or three others. The remaining dishes will arrive in no predictable order or spacing. Still, the food is good, and plentiful:  chicken, plantains, rice, and the apparently ever-present papa frito (French fries).

Allison Corbett (’09, 3rd year) and Molly Blumgart (’09, 2nd year) join Sarah Goldman as co-leaders and have done a remarkable job of pulling the team together. New team members, including Kevin Sethi (’12 – and the only undergraduate male on the trip) have caught on quickly to the core ideas, the basic methods, and the spirit of the project. We are all eager to get up the mountain tomorrow. New team members will be surprised by the steep and twisting climb, by the rocky roads and dust, and by the stamina of the people we pass who climb the roads seemingly without fatigue. Those of us who are returning will see familiar sites and will recall the urgency of the needs that persist here, yielding little to our efforts. We are not discouraged. We wish we could do more, quicker, but we believe that we are making some difference and that we have the ability to do much more.