Monkey Point

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to go on another community trip, this time to a place called Monkey Point, a mixed Mestizo and Creole village that lies two very rough sea hours to the south of Bluefields.

Monkey Point

Monkey Point is probably blueEnergy's most succesful installation in Nicaragua, which is to say that the turbine is working well, there are numerous households benefitting from the power provided, and the community is organised enough and harmonious enough to efficiently collect tariffs from the villagers for the power they use, and to reinvest it in the upkeep and development of the system. In addition, the power from the turbine lights the local school (also used for regular community meetings) and a small community center. My tasks on the trip were to install lighting and power points in said community centre, replace some ageing cables, replace the old storage batteries with some newer ones and also to audit the energy needs of the health center which is next on the list of projects that the village's energy commision has prioritised.

Me & Amy

Another of the tasks on my agenda was to carry out a training workshop for the villagers on how to correctly raise and lower the turbine. Although the turbine has been installed for a couple of years and the community has raised it and lowered it several times succesfully (e.g. during last year's hurricane), it had been observed by one of the volunteers that they weren't using the correct technique and that the method they used may potentially be dangerous. So we felt it was time for some refresher training on use of the pulleys, coordination of the procedure and safety aspects. However, it takes 14 villagers to raise and lower the turbine, and we were unable to interest more than four people to come to our training session. The reason - there was a crisis meeting underway regarding the fishing situation in the village. I joked with Jorge, my Nicaraguan colleague, that these people had their priorities all wrong. Jorge looked me straight in the eyes, deadly serious - "energía es una buena cosa, pero la pesca es una cuestión de sobrevivir" - energy's all well and good, but fishing is a matter of survival.

Discussing the freezer with the assembly

blueEnergy has worked hard and achieved much in bringing lighting to Monkey Point, but that's just the start. Until enough power can be generated that something productive can be done with it, lives aren't really going to change. Already though that is starting to happen. The Nicaraguan ministry of health, MINSA, is providing a freezer for vaccines for the village health center, and blueEnergy will help ensure that there is power to run it 24/7, 365 days a year. Whether that is by tapping into the existing wind turbine or installing new solar panels is still under investigation, but it is a good example of how productive uses for power can be found beyond simple lighting, TV and radio.

Monkey Point Sunset

How Not To Learn Spanish

One of the reasons I was excited to come to Nicaragua was for the chance to improve my Spanish, the basics of which I picked up on my travels through Central and South America a few years ago. I figured that living in a Spanish-speaking country for half a year, working with Spanish-speaking colleagues, being exposed to the language almost 24/7, I would inevitably leave here more or less fluent. Well, four months in and it actually feels like my Spanish has gone backwards rather than forwards. OK, I have a better technical vocabulary now and can tell you the spanish words for "wind turbine", "battery", "wire" and so on, but in terms of pure social communication, I feel less competent now than before. I still can't really say much more than ""buenas dias, como estas?" to the mamas that cook our lunch for us. I have more success chatting with some of the French volunteers who prefer to talk in Spanish than English, but that's mainly because I can just throw in an English word when I get stuck.

I think there are two main reasons why things are this way. Firstly, the local Nicaraguan accent is so bloody difficult to understand, with dropped s's everywhere, swallowed syllables and use of the vos form instead of tu (meaning a whole new verb conjugation to learn, as if there weren't enough already). Any attempt at a conservation quickly degenerates into a frustrating round of me asking people to repeat themselves a dozen times.

The other reason is the fact that I have just spent the last six years fighting to understand and be understood in German, and I really do feel a case of language learning fatigue. Although by the time I left Germany I was reasonably fluent, I still never felt really free when it came to expressing myself. I mean, I could do way more than just get my meaning across, but at the same time I always felt restricted and sort of trapped by my limited vocabulary and range of expressions. Now that I am trying to learn Spanish I feel like I'm right back at square one again, and it is just far too hard to find the motivation and enthusiasm necessary to stick my nose in a grammar book and move beyond the basics.

Meanwhile, on the work front, nothing much new to report. The biodigester construction, after weeks of delay, is finally about to start; mainly because the non-stop torrential rains that have been falling since friday threaten to cause the entire hillside behind Guillaume's house to slide down into the hole he dug for it. Nothing moving on the 17' turbine - sadly there is no chance that it will be built before I leave here in a month's time.

I'll just leave you with some photos from a trip me and three of the volunteers took to the Kahka Creek Forest Reserve a couple of weekends ago. Getting there took a two hour panga (fibreglass boat) ride across Pearl Lagoon to the Garifuna village of Orinoco. Then a 90 minute trip on the most unstable canoe I've ever sat in (it felt like sitting on top of a pile of books), and finally an hour's hike through cattle pastures before we arrived at the lodge on the edge of the jungle. The reserve is 600 hectares in size and has been in the process of being reforested since its establishment in 2000. The staff at the reserve are conducting various investigations into ways of speeding up the reforestation process. For example, they explained to us that by removing the vines that otherwise smother the trees, the trees grow faster. However, they then discovered the hard way that the vines actually help to make the forest more resistant to hurricanes, by anchoring the trees to the ground much like the guy wires of our turbines, and also binding individual trees together to form one giant interlinked structure. Learned the hard way, as three major hurricanes have struck the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua in the last three years, compared to a historical average of only one every ten...