Holiday moment...

El ferry is bigger, the road is now paved, there are more trucks, cars and trailbikes about, and there is wifi at our hotel... And the island of ometepe is as beautiful as ever, the two volcanoes tantalise by almost, but not quite emerging out of their clouds, the howler monkeys roar and caper in the trees, parrots fly overhead. It is lovely to have a few days holiday. Kate is being robinson crusoe out at salinas grandes and watching the pelicans. We will join her briefly after a quick visit to granada on the way back to leon, then it will be a few days of hectic finishing up: sheets and towel to el barrilete, meeting up with an association which helps families with children with cancer, and another which supports women who need help because of domestic violence. We will just have time to squeeze in a meal with the performers without borders team for this year, and then it will be the big silver bird for us. I do hope it will have stopped raining back in europe...

Malnutrition

At Los Quinchos we were always caught out trying to estimate the boys ages. We always guessed a lot younger than they were. There is only one explanation for this - chronic early childhood malnutrition. So many of the boys are really small. Twelve years olds with the stature of eight year olds, ten years olds who seem to be six. Once starved at an early age they will probably never reach the same height as correctly nourished children,  in spite of the regular meals they get at Los Quinchos. Malnutrition remains a fact of life in Nicaragua, with a diet rich in saturated fats and too few vegetables. There is lots of fruit, of course, but that doesn't necessarily make up for what's missing.

Old friends

Well said, chris, it's good to have a fresh eye on the situation.
It's been so good, over the last two days, to meet up again with zelinda and Carlos. Especially good to meet again with educadores whom we first met two or even four years ago, like Juan Carlos who worked at the quinchos centre on the tip at la chureca, teaching kids how to weave hammocks. He's now working at the filter house in Managua, a challenging job - all the children have to spend their first months at the filter house, getting themselves clean from glue sniffing  and other habits. Juan Carlos was very keen today to practise his English, he wants to get to the USA later this year. He's also a mean break dancer!
Good too to see familiar children who remembered us , two years on the boys are a little bit taller, the girls more confident. Lovely to see Belen who was such a neat dancer last time and has real talent for acrobatics and a wonderful smile.
M aggie's son Robert who was here with PWB last year has made a very lasting contribution here and we bathed in his reflected glory, the mama and Tia of Robert!

How much a child's Life?

Dickens knew that children could survive on the streets, but he knew the cost. When as a social explorer he investigated the dark "rookeries" around Seven Dials in early Victoria London, he discovered unimaginable poverty and human degradation. Many people believe such things are returning to the UK, but if you really want to find similar conditions look no further than the Mercado Oriental in Managua. This enormous, sprawling market on the east side of the city surrounded by poor housing and shanty towns is the regular dumping ground of unwanted children as young as two years old. Once they are dumped these children are prey to every imaginable wickedness, from drugs to prostitution. It is estimated that 80% of street children in Managua have resorted to prostituting themselves just to survive. Glue sniffing, theft and violence are rife.

Spin forward and meet Berman, a confident, articulate 20 year old, about to set out from Nicaragua for Argentina to continue a three year chef's training. His journey has already been epic. At six years old he was left by his alcoholic mother in a Parque Central. He survived, sleeping wherever he could, eating what he could find or beg. Meet Manuel, who at the age of six ran away from an impossible home situation in the north of the country, clinging alone to the back of buses until he reached Managua, hundreds of kilometres away. Meet any of the children at Los Quinchos and you'll find a story of incredible survival and rescue.

Los Quinchos and its sister homes were founded by Zelinda Roccia, a passionate Italian woman who has made it her life's work to rescue unwanted or abandoned children and nurture them into adulthood. There are now five homes, four in the south and one in the north. Zelinda runs this astonishing enterprise of care in tandem with several other professionals, including Carlos Vidal, an educational psychologist, assisted by young men and women who themselves have gone through the Los Quinchos system. Between them these remarkable people turn children whom most would give up for lost into young adults ready to enter the world.

We've been at the Los Quinchos boys home for the past two days. It's set in a 14 hectare estate, just outside San Marcos in the lush tropical uplands south of Managua. Here up to 40 boys can be accommodated, eight to a cabin. There is a daily timetable which helps instill in them both a sense of order and a feeling of being cared for. The structure of the day ensures that they are constantly engaged with each other doing something useful or enjoyable and preferably both. As if to emphasise this, pinned on the wall of the small hall which doubles as a theatre is a list of rights and duties. If this sounds a bit institutional it isn't. The list represents a kind of contract between those running the place and the children. Duties include helping with the work of the home, looking after the environment and respecting your peers, while rights include the right to health, food and a family life.

The atmosphere at Los Quinchos is astonishing. There is a real feeling of a large, quite rowdy family. A lot of the time it is difficult to remember that all the children have had an utterly miserable, and often threatening, start in life. Sometimes you see it in the face of a child whose eyes suddenly go blank, whose face crumples when they don't think you're looking. At such moments you see the depth of despair these children have suffered in the past, before they came to Zelinda's loving embrace. But most of the time there is an amazing positiveness to the place, whether the kids are cleaning up as they were yesterday or having a ball at the fiesta as they were today.

I am not a Christian but the experience of Los Quinchos reminds me of what St Paul said in his letter to the Corinthians - "And now these three remain, faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love". It is certainly love that drives the work of Los Quinchos. It is not driven by any phoney religiosity, nor by any theory of society. It is driven simply by the love and compassion Zelinda Roccia felt when she first saw children abandoned in Managua at the beginning of the Nineties. But unlike so many people who encounter degradation and misery when they visit foreign countries, yet forget when they return home or just send a few guilty donations to charity, she set about to convert that sense of outrage into a supremely loving adventure that has brought safety and a new life for hundreds of children.

Maggie and Kate have been supporting Zelinda's work for several years and on this visit they have agreed to continue and augment the financial assistance. This has been made possible by two large and generous donations made to the fund in the last three months. From what I saw during the past two days, it is money that will be put to work very quickly without any waste. Zelinda's will make sure of that.

Ex quinchos

Impossible to supress the emotion when you meet an ex quincho, impossible to imagine how a six year old might feel as he spends his first night in the park, abandoned. He has grown into a wonderful young man, full of humour, determined to help his big family as he calls it, who talked politics, ecology, education with us at lunch time. What an amazing organisation los quinchos is.

Methinks.."..

Methinks my sister doth protest too much, she speaks Spanish very competently now and understands most of it. And chris copes very well. It's very tiring listening and talking to people who make no concessions, however much you ask them to speak mas despacio! It's pleasantly cool this morning, quite windy, we had a lot of rain last night, ran home between the showers.
Carlos explained to us how the old Los quinchos centre at the tip has closed and there has been no assistance from the government to open another one as they deem it unnecessary now that the old tip has been flattened. Wishful thinking.
There are 11or so former Los quinchos members seeking out children who need help in the city, mostly in the markets. One, now four, was picked up at two, had no idea of what or where his family was, now is determined to become a Los quinchos helper himself, we may meet him today.

Remember Mañuel?

Well my self-taught Spanish is just about holding up here, but i do know that tomorrow And the day after are going to be fearsomely challenging, not just grownups who make some concessions to my limits, but a load of kids who don't! Kate is wonderfully unfazed by it all, chris and i are now promising ourselves a spanish immersion course! Heaven only knows where i will fit in, but probably best just to go back to the beginning...

Souvenirs

There are in fact some souvenir stalls in Leon that I'd missed, in front of the Museum of the Revolution. They've been there for some years but they are more or less the only ones in the city. It still seems strange that there are not more of them.

A few days in Leon

They say Leon is becoming quite a party town and you could easily believe it. When Maggie and Kate first came here in 2006 there were hardly any private cars. Hoses, carts and ancient Hilux trucks dominated the streets. Today that's all changed. The streets are full of shiny new Hiluxes, with the odd Land Cruiser thrown in. The taxis too have  changed. There are now a lot of new ones, although their suspension is still clanky, bashed to pieces by the potholes.
Restaurants too have multiplied. It's no longer just rice and beans with a bit of chicken. We've had some good food - pancakes with syrup, lemon chicken, tender pork and some decent beef. There is still gallopinto - rice and beans - but it's usually a side dish. In the main square there is a bar that would be at home in any major city - Sesteo - where you can sit with a cold beer and watch the world go by.
But don't be deceived. This is all in central Leon. Just a few blocks away are the barrios. There are concrete houses side by side with shacks with tin roofs. There is rubbish at the side of road and a foetid stream running in a small canyon. Relative poverty is right there in front of you. It is relative because according to UNICEF statistics, life in Nicaragua has got a lot better since 1970. But there is still a long way to go. A recent report from the World Bank shows that while employment roughly tracks the increase in the working population, productivity and earnings have stagnated. There is also a high unemployment rate for educated youth (30%) which means the country is not getting the benefit of its education system. However this is not unlike parts of Europe (Spain, Portugal) at the moment. It is, then, a mixed picture.
Finally one of the standout aspects of Leon for me is that there is hardly a tourist industry here yet. Yes, there is an increasing number of slickish eateries and there are a number of reasonable places to stay. And tour companies offer various things to do. But almost entirely missing are souvenir shops selling local artifacts, surely a sign that tourists are hardly recognised as a source of income. I'm sure this will change and maybe next time we'll be harassed by souvenir sellers just like anywhere else. But for the moment that just doesn't happen.

Sweaty shopping again

We've just spent a sweaty hour or two in a kind of discount depot which sells second hand and new household textiles and clothes. We've been here before, Anna, rigo's housekeeper is invaluable, she checks every sheet we buy and every towel, we need 60 of each for the Los quinchos centres in San Marcos and 10 of each for el barrilete. She chooses, we fold, it's an echo of when we used to fold sheets with our mother. It's a good workout. We get a discount, 5 per cent, not much for such a big purchase but every dollar counts, it comes to 357 dollars. We leave with two huge bags which we certainly can't carry, find a taxi big enough to carry all this and us (there are a lot of small, new taxis in Leon, no good for this job) home, and in a very British way put the kettle on and make a cup of tea.

Mmmmmm

Mmmm a siesta after the hot hot bus journey from esteli back to Leon has been good. What does this week hold I wonder? Sheet and towel buying for one thing, more supplies of toothpaste and soap.

Estelí

Estelí is much cooler than león, time for a little woollie in the evenings! It's as busy and hectic as ever, the pavements are very narrow, the parking erratic, the main street lined with little shops selling everything, but particularly mobile phones and clothes. The fruit and veg are on barrows in the street or on the pavement. Reminiscent of places like walthamstow market, or the one in deptford!

Painting on the Walls

El Colectivo de Muralistas David Alfaro Sigueiros is named for the famous Mexican muralist whose work covers a lot of walls in Mexico city. Here in Esteli the tradition is kept alive by a talented group of painters working for the Colectivo, run by Julio Moreno. Their latest work is represented by a couple of massive murals at the new health centre just out of town. One of the murals is in a large assembly hall, the other in a long corridor running the length of the hospital. The first celebrates the lives of health workers in Nicaragua, alongside pictures of two famous figures from Nicaragua's revolutionary past - Augusto Sandino and Esteli's own poet, Leonel Rugama. There is also a portrait of Hugo Chavez, who donated large sums of money to Nicaragua from Venezuela.
The other mural reflects child health from birth - Mama Licha is there again -  through childhood vaccinations.Both murals are intended to be educative, showing the value of healthcare for the nation.
The colours are always bright, the painting hard edged and resolute. They will remain this way in the hospital but outside in the streets the colours fade in the sun. Some of the murals are also defaced by graffiti. The artists from the Colectivo from time to time renovate old murals but money is tighter now than in the past and the renovation of old murals may not be top priority. The Fund provides a small amount of money to the Colectivo on the basis that their work is important in getting across the message about the health of children and women.

The Baby Haven

It takes time and ingenuity to find Mama Licha's clinic. Esteli is built on a grid pattern and it was either two down and three across and two down or one down three across and three down. Either way we got fairly confused and spent more time than really necessary to reach the clinic. It is actually housed in Mama Licha's house which sits in a nondescript street. There is a bell which is surely far too high for more Nicaraguan women to reach beside an iron grill protecting the front door. We rang. We rang again. We waited. Nothing. Eventually we phoned and Mama Licha picked up the phone immediately. Moments later the door opened and it was instantly clear why no one heard the bell - the house stretches back for a very long way right into the garden where the clinic itself has been built.
Mama Licha is very small but buzzing with energy. She brings us through the house to her demonstration room, throwing out a comment that "There are many placentas buried in the garden out there." This aside is typical of her style, no nonsense, earthy and unembarrassed.
Once sat down, Mama Licha brings out the photos of some of the smiling women and babies who have passed through her clinic. We are then joined by her daughter Nora, a local dance teacher, who seems to be endowed with similar energy.
But there is almost no time for conversation before fourteen women of varying ages and all heavily pregnant, pile into the room. Mama Licha launches into a prenatal meeting. She takes them through the stages of pregnancy, then with the aid of some magnificent

props, including a knitted uterus, a plastic bag and a fabric doll, explains the process of birth and what the women can expect. It is all done with humour and touches of fine acting, designed to relieve the expectant mothers of any embarrassment. The demonstration finished, she asks them how many children each has and where they come from. For quite a few this is a second or even fourth child and most are from the local region, though their journey to Esteli may have taken many arduous hours from remote villages. One has come all the way from Leon just to have Mama Licha as her midwife. And one of them is only fourteen, nervously expecting her first child, a mere child herself. No one asks about fathers but for this young girl, the question could have had a troublesome answer.
We finish our visit by handing out the clothing we've brought with us, including the matinee jackets hand knitted in Wales by a lady in her eighties. And of course there is donation of money to help Mama Licha carry on her vital work in a country whose macho tradition is not conducive to the sort of service she provides.

Prenatal class! We have just attended class for expecting mums! Gosh.

Changing Faces

We learned a startling fact yesterday. In the United States the incidence of cleft lip and palate is one in twelve hundred live births. Here in Nicaragua it is one in eight hundred. That is twenty five pecennt higher than in the United States. The reason is simple - maternal nutrition. The women of the remote regions of Nicaragua often do not have a sufficiently good diet to nourish a healthy foetus. The result is a multiplicity of birth defects, such as cleft lip and palate.
Reparing a cleft lip takes about ninety minutes. The same time is required for the repair of a cleft palate. If the birth defect is serious four operations may be required until the child is sixteen. But there's more. Unless the operation is done before the child begins to learn to speak - normaly just around one year old - the child will never learn to enunciate properly and will always have a speech defect unless there is extensive speech therapy later in life. Therefore without surgery at the correct time, a life will be blighted for good. Dr Herdocia told us he performs perhaps two or three such operations pro bono per week, a maximum of 150 per year. In a country of six million, many of whom are living at subsistence level, there is a crying need for what he does.
Fortunately Gustavo Herdocia is now involved in a training initiative to bring more plastic surgeons into the system. Working with other reconstructive surgeons from the USA, Switzerland and Germany, the Nicaplast methodology is spreading to other countries in Latin America and even to Mongolia!
But the issue of nutrition remains and in spite of the Nicaplast organisation, children will continue to suffer unless their mothers receive better nutrition during pregnancy. Here the work of midwives like Mama Licha in Esteli, northern Nicaragua is vital. But trying to get the message across about nutrition to young women and girls who may not even know how they got pregnant - there is almost no sex education in this country - is a huge task. The donations the Fund makes to Gustavo Herdocia and Mama Licha are important but only a small part of what is really needed.

Like a flock of birds

They came like a flock of birds, running from the building, small arms stretched out for a hug. Some of the children were tiny, some older, some more shy than others, but all of them twittering words of welcome. We had arrived at El Barrilete just before ten in the morning. It was already hot. We'd set out in a taxi, one of us in the front with two of us in the back squashed up against an old lady clutching her zimmer frame. She was let out half way to our destination in the barrio. The streets were increasingly rutted as we drove further from the centre of town until we really reached El Barrilete.
It's really just a group of concrete shacks with tin roofs. In fact until a few years ago it had no roof at all. Maria, the amazing woman who runs the place swiftly invited us inside and told us to sit down. In out honour the children were to put on a show of dancing. We sat round the walls, the children all around us on small chairs. Music boomed out from the back and the kids danced. They seemed to only have one yellow dancing frock which had to fit them all, so the smaller ones danced in billowing material that seemed to flow round them like yellow feathers. We all clapped and clapped as both the young ones and the older ones went through their paces. We ended with Lionel on his unicycle, a child on his shoulders as he weaved in and out of three chairs in the middle of the room.
These children all have their individual stories. Some live with their parents, some with their grandparents while their parents try to earn money down south in richer Costa Rica. But some of them are just abandoned, like the tiny one who sat beside Maggie, playing with the bangles on her wrist and occasionally yawning. He is only one year old and came with his brother who is not much older. Most of their lives have been blighted by drugs o/r prostitution or just plain poverty. All of them desperately need the haven they find at El Barrilete.
After the performance finished, we sat with Maria in the storeroom next door where she told us what she needed. It comes down to money of course - dinero. Maria may be a miracle worker but she can't achieve any of it without funds. She needs money to feed the children, to pay for a night guard, to provide more towels and sheets, for toothpaste and toothbrushes, for nit combs and shampoo, and finally for disposable nappies for the tiny baby she now has to provide for.
We leave El Barrilete with Lionel driving the ancient pickup truck, which doesn't want to start immediately, to buy a lot of the things she needs. We end up at a shop near the cathedral which seems to sell everything from nit combs to teapots. It takes some time to get everything and eventually we leave with two large cardboard boxes and a plastic bag full of bits and pieces. The total comes to just 2500 Cordobas or about 100 dollars. It's such a small sum but the difference it will make immediately is enormous. Of course there is also a much bigger sum given to Maria for the major future expenditure with a promise of more to come once we can establish her future priorities.

El Barrilete visit

Today we visit El Barrilete, an after-school project for poor children in Guadalupe, León. These children often come from families with drug or alcoholic problems, or have parents in prostitution or working on the streets, and for this reason can not help them with their homework after school. In many cases their parents have left the country to work in Costa Rica or other places, and the children are left with their grandmother or other relatives. The children come to Barrilete to eat lunch, learn, play and to get help with their school assignments.

However, lately, because of increasing problems in their homes, many children are sleeping in Barrilete also. This has increased the costs of running the project, as they have had to buy beds, sheets, pillows etc. and also offer breakfast and dinner to the children, in addition to the lunch that was already offered to them. This has also led to that  the project manager, Maria, has to live at the project to take care of the children. There are about 10-18 children sleeping in Barrilete every night.

The Mayagna Children's Fund, which is just one of the sources of funding for the project, has been supporting El Barrilete for two years now and it will be interesting to see how the project has changed since the last visit in 2012.

Leon is changing

It seems that Leon is changing rapidly and this presumably reflects the changes going on throughout the country. When Maggie and Kate first came here there were virtually no private cars and the majority of transport was either old lorries or horses and carts. Today the streets are full of cars and there are even traffic jams round the market area. Many of the cars look new and quite a lot of them are large SUVs.
And whereas six years ago there were very few places to eat and drink, now small bars and eateries are everywhere, some with chic decor and chicer customers.
But its clear that with all this development, enthusiastically embraced by Nicaraguans, a section of society runs the risk of being left behind. This is hardly a new phenomenon in countries undergoing rapid development but it does not detract from the difficulty of the problem. So in spite of the development you see all round you in Nicaragua, and to a certain extent because of it, the work Kate and Maggie do here and the money the fund dispenses remains vital.

Leon

First walk in Leon. Built on a grid pattern with single storey buildings, it's hot,windy and in places colourful. It's always a bit phantasmagoric this first walk in a new place. There is sensory overload at work as you walk the streets, trying at the same time not to fall down some of the gaping holes under missing manhole covers. Never quite knowing which way the traffic is coming stepping off the pavement is always risky. It might be a bike or more likely the local vehicle of choice, an ancient Toyota Hilux, that comes barrelling down on the unwary.
Our guesthouse is along from the main square and cathedral, a white smooth stucco building which has, apparently, a very impressive interior. I have yet to visit. Now the sun is setting and night takes over. The sounds change and the darkness becomes palpable. Later it will be beer and something to eat. Tomorrow we go into action.

A long flight

What a long journey! Flight to London, overnight in a hotel at Heathrow, early flight to Houston delayed by nearly two hours. In and out of immigration at Houston, then nearly two hour wait for flight to Managua. Two and a half hours on that plane, then into the steamy night heat of the airport. Immigration again this time very quick. Short walk over the road to the airport hotel, cold beer and bed. Altogether a journey of more that twenty four hours. But we're here together with our luggage. Hoorah.
Today it's a short bus ride to Leon. More, as they say, follows.

Expectations

I really don't know what to expect on this trip. Maggie and Kate have told me so much about Nicaragua and the people and organisations they help there. I've heard so much about the bars and the music in Leon, about Esteli and the long journeys by bus. I've read the Lonely Planet guide, pored over the map, visited web sites, even listened to Radio Managua streamed on the internet. But the people and places they know there are still just names to me - Rigo, Zelinda, Mamalicha, Granada, Las Salinas. It's a long list. 
I have an idea of course, as we all do of places we have heard so much about. But it's just an idea at the moment. The reality of the heat, the intense sunlight a few degrees off the Equator, the smells, the strangeness of another place is going to wallop me immediately I get off the plane in Managua, tired from a long twelve hour journey.It's part of the joy and surprise of travelling by plane. You get on in one place that is familiar (so sad, perhaps, that Heathrow is familiar), and off in another that is utterly foreign just a few hours later. Perhaps I might even like it.

Packing for departure

packing nearly done, lists, etc., haven't forgotten safety pins and rubber bands, looks a bit nippy in texas but nica temperatures look good.

looking forward

looking forward to seeing all our chums again in Nicaragua, to giving them a helping hand. also looking forward to a few holiday activities, and will do our best not to get eaten by crocodiles or swept away by rogue currents. more from the land of volcanoes in due course!

We're counting the days to the start of the journey. Bags aren't packed yet, but things are assembled. It's a long journey to Nicaragua - London-Houston-Managua. It's about 12 hours by plane, with a short layover in Houston, where we have to go through immigration, then emigration. It seems rather pointless but that's the way it's done.