... from where I left off.
Now. The town we were in was called Boca de Sabalo. I don't know why I couldn't remember that. I guess all the car-jouncing kinda loosened my brain or something.
The town is called that because it is where the Sabalo tributary river meets up with the bigger Rio San Juan, so, its mouth ("boca").
Uh oh, re-reading what I wrote before I now also realize I skipped almost a whole day. In this day, we did, indeed, go to Jinotega. It was nice. We were pretty darn lucky because a DED professional whom Nina works with was able to take us in her truck all the way there and back, so we had a very relaxed trip.
Nina in Jinotega:
Part of the mission was to see off a DED volunteer who will be living in Jinotega for a year and a half. Jinotega is a very, very pretty little mountain town (about Marquette sized, but surrounded by cloudy forested mountains) that unfortunately had the opposite of a warm welcome for this nice girl, whose pre-arranged living arrangement-keepers basically told her "oh, we're not ready for you. I guess we forgot. Get a hotel or something." We all felt pretty bad for her, especially because she was a volunteer and not making money, so couldn't really afford a hotel for this undisclosed amount of time. But being white meant having money to her future landlords, so on the street she went. There was another nice couple who agreed to take her in for the time being, but what a crappy welcome to your new home!
And we bought boots and things for our voyage. When I told my dad that I wasn't bringing a hat he said that I should get one like the locals wear, and they'll be happy with it. So I did, and bought a NY Yankees cap. Seriously. Baseball, and it seems the Yankees in particular, are huge there. Plus my head was way too big for the Boston and Oakland caps I tried on first (hey, the yankees cap was black. I didn't really want to deal with that extra heat).
THEN we went to Managua, stayed at Anja's house, THEN went to Boca de Sabalo. Phew.
Crossing the Sabalo river itself:
Ok, now we're up to speed.
Boca De Sabalo. At time of last posting (with actual content, that is) I still had no idea where we were going to spend the night. I wandered back up to the mayor's office (where the development meeting was taking place and where Nina and Miguel were), just in time for: the sun to set, a storm to roll in, and the power to go out. All 3 of these things lasted pretty much all night, (especially the first one,) and made everything awfully dark.
Like this:
We had dinner at the same place that we had lunch at (there were apparently only 2 options for sit-down, roof-over-your-head dinners in the entire town, and one of them was across the river and so was not an option during the storm) and it was good and candle-lit, but the exact same food as their lunch. This is where I met Jan, the DED guy trying to start up a new program in the area, and so the in-charge DED guy there.
But then as I found out, it was our very own Miguel (the one who drove us down the entire way) who is the seriously big-cheese of the whole event. He is the representative from this german chocolate company who is basically in control of quality of exports to Germany. (You can find these chocolates in the US in World Market stores, at least.) Nina said she was surprised to hear everybody referring to him by the most formal "you" and "him" words in Spanish. It's sort of like saying "sir," but in Spanish you have many more parts of speech where you can express that kind of respect. Make sense? Anyway. He was the bottom line here, clearly, because exports had to pass his inspection to be bought by the company, and most of this workshop was to explain how to achieve the quality he was looking for, as well as how he will be doing the testing.
So he's basically a supply quality engineer, like Vishaka. Only he's one that's supposed to be able to taste smoke contamination in raw cacao beans, for instance. So basically Vishaka would've loved to tag along, I'm sure.
We ended up staying the night, and the next couple nights, at the company house that Jan lived in. It was a really nice, big, wood-interior house, and we woke up each morning to a combination of roosters crowing and howler monkeys going insane outside.
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| From Nicaragua! Matagalpa, Jinotega, Rio San Juan |
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