Our group from ESW Northwestern, traveled down to Teustepe, Nicarauga, for our Spring Break for the final leg of our yearlong project to install biodigesters for rural families in Nicaragua. Our project involved raising money for, researching, and implementing 10 biodigesters.
Now, biodigesters are an interesting concept. They are essentially giant sealed containers for you to store your poo in. What happens is that the poo is exposed to an oxygen-free environment where anaerobic bacteria thrive. These bacteria are able to consume the organic poo, and in the process, produce biogas. Biogas is very cool because it contains a large volume of methane. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, it is actually over 20 times worse than carbon dioxide (according to whatever scale they use), and this methane is usually released back into the atmosphere whenever a cow poops or farts. By capturing this biogas, the methane can now be burned as a fuel.
We worked with two partner NGO’s, Green Empowerment and Asofenix. They are both overall pretty frikkin amazing. Asofenix in particular maintains extremely close contact with the families they work with, to the point where they know who in the village is related to who. They also have worked with the families and communities for a long time, not just going in, dabbling, and then bouncing. We saw some signs advertising some other NGO’s scattered around the roads. Funny thing was, no one actually remembers them ever helping out in the communities…
Overall, Nicaragua was pretty darn sweet. Even the Nicaraguan person I sat next to on the flight was awesome. He kept telling me about his experiences on the Chinese cruise ship he worked on. He told me about the places he’s seen, and the Chinese girlfriend that he had. I don’t remember his name, but I remember his face, as well as his girlfriend’s face, since he showed me about a hundred pictures on his phone before it died from low battery. He also told me about his work plan. He usually works 3 to 5 years at a time on the cruise ship, and then returns home to his family for a year with the money he earned. It’s ridiculous to think how globalization can enable a Nicaraguan countryman to travel around the world and see sights many others wouldn’t be able to see, but at the same time, force him away from his home and families for years at a time. He liked his job a lot because he gets to see the world, but he also didn’t sleep for the last three days of travel because he was so excited he finally got to go home again.
At first, we were worried that it would be uncomfortably hot in Nicaragua, since it was so close to the equator, and there wasn’t going to be any fans or AC where we were going to work. However, turns out, the dry season is pretty comfy. The air was dry, and the breezes were refreshing. The sun was hot, but shade was plentiful. The dry season, about December to March, is a great warm place for people afraid of humidity, although you may definitely miss the luscious green that usually pervades Nicaragua.
Once on the ground, he were housed in AsoFenix’s headquarters. I still can’t find their website, but here is Jake from Asofenix’s blog. Anyway, they had a nice little home nestled in a small community a few block away from the airport. First thing I learned there was that people don’t flush toilet paper down the bowl. Instead, they throw it away in the trash. But don’t worry, the toilet paper was so nice smelling that you don’t notice at all.
After a night there, we headed out down the Pan-American Highway to get to el campo, where we were going to be doing our work. Now, if you checked that link, you realize that it is a pretty frikkin long highway. Despite its length, in Nicaragua, it was only two lanes, one going south, one going back north. Another thing we realized while on the highway was that Nicaragua has the coolest public transportation system ever. So remember those giant yellow school buses we rode back in grade school? Well, turns out, when they get too old to pass state inspections, they get driven down to countries like Nicaragua, where they are painted with various hot rod decals and raced around as public transportation buses. I never knew the buses could go so fast, but I quickly learned after the same bus would pass us on the highway, stop for passengers, and then pass us again a few miles down. Also, they are even more badass because they don’t have schedules. They basically run whatever route they usually run, stopping at around the same time, at places like “the corner where Pedro’s Discoteca used to be.”
So later we arrived at the villages we were working with. They were pretty much like the “nong cun” of China. They would farm and live in homes they built themselves, and in both, they would have small TVs with music video disc players. China has their Chinese pop artists, and Nicaragua has their Nicaraguan pop artists. We toured some of the previous projects in the area, and then started work on our own biodigesters.
