The Beauty and the Beast. And Stamps.

When I was flying on the third and final leg of my journey to Nicaragua I was given three pieces of paper to complete for immigration. One of them was a declaration that I was in good health. I had to answer several questions about symptoms I may have, such as cough and fever. One of the “yes/no” questions was “fatigue”. Not only did I wonder what on earth they would do if anyone said “yes” to that, but I mused on the fact that I was actually extremely fatigued from being up for nigh on 24 hours and I was now going to have to lie. This was after I had already had to reassure the USA immigration authorities that not only was I not intending to indulge in terrorist activities, but that neither had I been involved in Nazi war crimes in the past (I didn’t have to lie about either of those). The Nicaraguan Department of Unnecessary Bureaucracy continued in the airport, where I discovered their love of stamps (the ink ones, not the postage ones). All of those three pieces of paper including the one I lied on about not being fatigued were handed to various people and stamped. My passport was stamped. Since then almost everything has been stamped. Dr Sandra has a little fold up stamp, so she can stamp her medical record entries and two copies of each prescription. Bills in restaurants are stamped. Receipts for purchases are stamped. Air tickets are stamped. The ladies in the seed distribution and sapling distribution centres stamped merrily on all sorts of pieces of paper and put them in massive piles of similarly stamped documents. It’s amazing. The country’s economy could well be surviving on the stamp industry. In an idle moment I wondered if it would be possible to bring down the country’s government by importing a load of fake stamps and going round stamping things. Or perhaps embargo the importing of stamp ink and eventually the country would grind to a halt when no-one was able to stamp anything. It’s a thought.

Fresh water for domestic use and irrigation is at a real premium on the island. Dick has huge plans to change this. He has spotted a place where there are signs of flowing water underground, and wants to buy a small corner of land from a local family – only 12-16 square metres – to bore a well and to provide local villages with fresh clean water. I sat in on the negotiations with the lady this morning, in her home. This was a dark single room with a tin roof, and there was an attached area functioning as a kitchen which I could see through an open door. The mud floor and cement rendered walls made for a gloomy interior. Dick translated for me to keep me abreast of what Idalgo was discussing with her, but she was still unwilling to surrender the land. Taking in the surroundings I noticed a beautiful large yellow and black butterfly flutter in through the open front door and sit for a while in the patch of sunlight in front of me. At almost the same time some snorting caught my attention and over my shoulder I saw a muddy pig and piglet wander into the kitchen area. Beauty and the beast, I thought. The pigs were snuffling around the wood-fired cooking area where somewhat ironically they would probably end up as dinner one of these days. The butterfly fluttered off out of the front door. The negotiations stopped when the lady said she had to discuss it with her sister in the USA. Dick will hear what she plans to do in a week or two.

I’ve no idea when I will be able to post this. It’s the afternoon of Wednesday 26^th, Dick is having a siesta before we go off to find the political leader of Omotepe (They’d be the Mayor if this was the UK), and I have a few moments breathing space so I’m sitting under a tree outside the accommodation block at the CVC typing this and being nibbled by ants. It’s warm, still and sunny but over to my left a mountainous cloud is building up and thunder is booming away. Tomorrow we get up at stupid o’clock (I said that to Dick and he found it enormously amusing) to have breakfast and get the stuff in the pick-up to go to the ferry for 07:30. Then we drive to Managua, drop most of our luggage off at Casa Mary Jane where we slept for the first two nights after we arrived in Nicaragua, get rid of the vehicle then we fly off after lunch to Bluefields – a city on the Caribbean coast Dick describes as “dysfunctional”.  There’s no road access. SIFT has some work there and I going to see what’s been achieved. We won’t have time to pop into the hotel on Omotepe first, so I’m not sure when we will next have internet access.

I’ll be sad to leave Omotepe. It’s been an amazing time dominated by one of the most awe-inspiring natural sights I have ever seen. Dick wants SIFT to help transform this island, and a start has certainly been made. In many respects it’s a tropical paradise; in other’s it’s an island of poverty with people barely subsisting. I understand now why Dick loves the place and keeps coming back. A great work is under-way and long may it continue.