Friday night and we're in El Sauce

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Hola! We are in El Sauce now and we´ve already had a lot of adventures.

Our flights were good and on time. We arrived in Nicaragua early afternoon on Thursday but unfortunately, 7 of out bags did not. Forutunately, we had Marcia with us to speak Spanish to the people there and we learned that our bags were still in Miami. They would be sent over on the next flight and delivered to our hotel. We were met at the airport by Lenin who is our main contact here in for SchoolBOX. He drove us to our hotel the Los Pinos. It is a lovely hotel with comfortable rooms. those who had their suitcases changed into some comfortable clothes. Lenin ordered pizza from Pizza Hut for us for lunch. We rested a bit at the hotel and then we set off on our first adventure.

We went to a nearby volcano called Macaya. One of our SchoolBOX people here, David, used to work as a park employee so he had lots of stories to tell us about the volcano. We climbed up 77 steps tohave a good look down into the mouth of the volcano. The smell of the sulphur was quite pronounced.

After the volacno trip we headed back tour rooms for a little rest and a swim in the pool at the hotel. The air is quite warm and very humid. We find ourselves having to drink a lot of water. the hotel and the two vans we travel in are air conditioned.

We are being very cautious to watch what we eat. We ask a lot of questions about the vegetables and the drinks to make sure that purified water was used or the veggies were cooked. So far, everyone is well.

The missing bags arrived at the hotel just before 10. It was nice to have a shower and get into some clean clothes and then go to bed. We were all very tired after such a long day.

Managua is very different than what we are used to . Everything has a fence around it including barbed wire or broken glass at the top. The SchoolBOX people are very concerned about our saftey and never let us go anywhere without one of them with us.

Friday morning we had breakfast at the hotel which inluded gallo pinto. It is a tasty mixture of rice and beans. We headed off to hear about how SchoolBOX got started and visited the very first office. It was in a small concret building with no amenities. While we were listening to Ronal talk about getting SchoolBOX started with Tom Affleck, his sister in law was doing the laundry. We were all in the back part of the house in a concrete courtyard while she washed the clothes by hand in a concrete sink outside. Talk about hard work!

After that we visited the store where we purchased the school supplies that we have donated to the school we are helping. We are able to provide a backpack which inlcudes 5 notebooks, 2 pencisl, an eraser, a pencil sharpener and a package of plasticine for 47 children. the number of children at the school has grown from 32 to 47. We are also suppliying the teachers with two white boards, markers notes books pens and pencils and a bag to carry it all in. This will be a tremendous help to the people at the school.

We then headed to Leon for lunch and then visited Ronalds farm where he grew up. he told us about his struggles with education in that he had to walk many kilometers to school and had to work to earn the money to buy supplies.

We are now in El Sauce. it is aobut 2 hours from Leon. It is defnitely more rustic. I´m running out of time on the computer so I will try to be more concise tomorrow.
Hola!

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