Into the Wild Spaces

These weeks have been extraordinarily busy, and (except for Tipitapa) the stream profiles we surveyed all over the north of Nicaragua were a pleasant start to the month.

Much of what the Army Corps does in Nicaragua involves water resources, which has been fortunate for me. Our project, the post hurricane Mitch reconstruction program, will last until December of 2001, and what we're trying to do in infuse some new ideas and some solid engineering skills into a country desperately short on good technical skills. After over two years of approaching "international development" from the ground level up, I'm suddenly working from the other end.

Happily, there's been some overlap. One of our projects is the design of a new bridge for the town of Condega and its outlying communities. I'd lived in that area for two complete years, and when hurricane Mitch washed away our bridge, I was trapped on the far side of civilization as much as anyone else was. During the rainy seasons of both 1998 and 1999, there were long stretches of time in which there was simply no way to get out of the quiet mountain communities to town to see a doctor, make a phone call, or buy food supplies or medicine. So the greatest of the many strokes of irony that grace my new job is that I can be a part of the project that will most affect the lives of my old friends in the Nicaraguan countryside, and I was permitted the hero's job of going back to my old community to announce that they'd have a new bridge before too long.

Nicaragua, meanwhile, moves from disaster to disaster, and last week we experienced a series of earthquakes, three of them over 5.0 on the Richter scale, that shook Managua like water in a glass, and knocked down a number of homes south of here in the Masaya area. They were the first earthquakes I've ever experienced and were not pleasant. The first one caught me in my second story office building, and the floor bubbled like a cat creeping under the carpet. The others were no more enjoyable to an east coaster who grew up on a sand bar.

The episode ends with a parakeet on my shoulder, a little green and yellow feller I've named the gender-neutral `Xiloa' who flew all by himself (herself?) out of somebody's bird cage to my girlfriend Ericka's house. She brought it to me as a gift and someone to keep me company. Xiloa and I struck a deal: she'll stay around as long as it takes for her trimmed wing feathers to grow back out, and then if she'd like to return to the jungle, she has my blessing. Or she can stick around for the diet of bananas and bread-soaked-in-milk that she seems to enjoy so much, and I can continue the interesting conversation I've been having with the chatty little thing.

All well under the mango tree.