Early days

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Our first day post arrival in Managua felt highly intensive. It involved lots of forgetting of names, lots of nodding knowingly when we had no idea what we were being told in brisk Spanish and lots of trying to be nonchalant about places and situations very removed from anything we had previously encountered. Under the wing of Susan, the leader of activities here, we were navigated around the chaotic streets in the sticky heat of Managua. The primary mission for our day in Nicaragua’s capital city was to have ourselves recognised by the National Engineering University as being part of a legitimate programme (www.grupofenix.org), meet the programme staff based there, tour Suni Solar one of the entrepreneurial spin-offs from Grupo Fenix and have a solar cooked lunch (more about that later). Although some cloud nearly thwarted lunch all was achieved and from our understanding with reasonable success. Our bed was more than welcome that night as our minds had seemed to have given up on any neural activity battered by almost constant Spanish and still working on a time zone seven hours removed.

We waved farewell to the nuns who had looked after us royally shortly before 7am the following morning. An exhilarating taxi ride later we were at one of Managua’s five bus stations ready for an express bus north towards Sabana Grande, near Ocotal, the village that we will call home for the next six months. The three and a half hour bus journey proved fairly uneventful although the bizarre choice of in-bus entertainment two brutal and sickeningly graphic action films would not have been missed.

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