Palmira

Yesterday we made our first trip to Palmira, which is a very poor town about 30 minutes away from Somoto. For the duration of the time in Nicaragua the group will be going to Palmira every Thursday. There we will help build Adobe houses, these are houses almost completely made of mud. Many of the people who will be living in these houses have been living their lives pretty much in a tent. The efforts for this project are initiated by INPRHU, which is Canada World Youth´s contact here in Nicaragua.

On Thursdays we will be put into teams of two, One Nicaraguan from INPRHU and one Canadian from CWY. Each team will be resonsible for assisting 2-3 different families. The purpose of yesterdays trip was to get introduced to the families we will be assisting.

My partener and I are responsible for 2 families. Well one ¨family¨ only consits of one woman who is aproximately 45-50, who lives alone with her sickly dog. Her living conditions look very dismall, and even more dismal was her supply of drinking water. The only drinking water the woman owns comes from the rain that falls out of the sky. Which is the same for all the people living in that area. This woman has a tiny field of corn, and we well be helping her grow her corn, and plant more and plow some more land for her, as she is too sick and weak to do it herself.

The second family is a Single girl who is 18 years old who already has three kids. Two of her kids one 7 and the other 5 are currently attending the local school, so I did not get the chance to meet them. She also has a 7 month old baby who I also did not see. It is sad to see this woman and the living conditions she was under. This has been the biggest shock for me since coming to nicaragua. This is true poverty.

The saddest thing about Palmira was looking at the drinking water that they used to use before INPRHU stepped in and provided them with a means to collect rain water. This water was mucky brown, there was mud, dirt, and mierda (shit), in the water. The water was so disgusting, I would not even try washing my hands in it. To think that they had to drink this water. I wish I could show you a pciture of this at this moment, but unfortuneatly I cant, but hopefully I will be able to post one next time.



I strayed away from my idea of themes, as this experiance was very important to me, but I feel this will often be the case. So sometimes my post might be about my day, maybe a specific theme, some will be happy, and sometimes somber as this one was, you will just have to come back to see.

Adios!