The following was written by Hannah Conroy, one of the travel team members for the EWB Latin America Chapter, during their January assessment trip to Nicaragua:
Alimikamba and Todd the Toad
This morning we woke up in Siuna and had the normal breakfast (with tortilla instead of bananas - we were sure to catch up on the banana count later in the day!) at the hotel. We ran some errands and were off to Alimikamba.
It took about 3 hours on mostly dirt roads with some areas of pavement. Definitely a better ride than yesterday. As we left the mountains, the scenery became more flat and less green. We also passed quite a few rivers and bridges.
We arrived in Alimikamba and went right to the hunting lodge, a hotel created by a Texan named Bud who everyone calls Papa Tera. We had found out the night before that Marcus was unable to make it to Alimikamba so he told us to talk to Tera. Papa Tera is a very interesting man with lots of ideas on how to generate money in Alimikamba, but he wasn't that informed about our group and what we were looking for. We learned that Alimikamba has lots of problems including dry wells, flooding, and very complicated politics between the Indigenous people and the new settlers.
After talking with Papa Tera we went to get our usual lunch at a restaurant down the street. We then drove around Alimikamba and saw the river and some of the wells. It is definitely a poorer town than we had seen so far. Pedro took us to his mothers house and we met his brother and drank cocunut milk from coconuts we cut off trees.
After we went with Papa Tera to a computer hut that Harvest Initiative had attempted to create for education, but they had trouble getting Internet and maintaining the computers. We talked more with Papa Tera and then headed back to the same restaurant from earlier for dinner. We got to mix it up a bit and ate fried fish; it was good but hard to eat around the bone.
We ended the night at the lodge and discussed the plan of attack for our meeting with community leaders tomorrow. We also found a toad in the bathroom - we named him Todd the Toad!
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