July 18, 2009
On Monday a new volunteer arrived, Rebekah, she is from the U.K. and seems really nice.
On Tuesday the Solar Center was closed for a staff meeting, so all the volunteers took an hour bus ride to Estelli. In Estelli we went to an Nicaraguan art store, renewable energy farm, and toured a cigar factory. The cigar factory was probably the most interesting because there were about 200 people sitting there rolling cigars. It was kind of ironic because some of the men were smoking a cigar as they were rolling them.
On Tuesday night Erin and I spent the night in Estelli and went shopping for supplies for informational plaques at the Solar Center. We found all our supplies but ran into a few problems… We needed poles for the plaques and we could only buy them in 6 meter lengths, which we thought we would be able to get the place to cut them into 5 foot lengths that we needed – however this was not the case, they would not cut them. So between the two of us we had 3 – 6 meter long poles and 8 pieces of wood 1″x11¨x24¨, a lot to manage between the two of us. We were looking for a truck Taxi, but a man with hand cart approached us and told us he could take everything we had to the bus station. We doubted him, but he actually pulled it off pretty nicely and went through busy traffic to cross the road twice. Once we got to the bus station we waited 45 minutes with our stuff and then got a bus. The bus attendant helped load all our goods and then we were on our way. The bus stopped right in front of the Solar Center and dropped off all our goods. Looking back on it things went rather smoothly, but on that day it was a little stressful trying to plan out how much we could carry and how to get all our supplies from point A to point B.
Friday Erin and I took of for Masaya to do some touristy shopping and then went to Granada. Today 6 other volunteers joined us in Granada for a relaxing weekend. Tomorrow we are planning on going zip linning, which involves a harness and cable and you hanging on for your dear life, we´ll see how that goes! Tomorrow is also the 30th anniversary of the revolution here in Nicaragua, so hopefully it doesn´t get too crazy here! Monday we are taking off from Managua and riding on the back of a truck for 3 1-2 hours back to the Solar Center with some student from UNI (their University here) that are interested in testing the solar autoclave for us. I am pretty excited I really like truck bed rides, they are the most scenic. Also this week we are having 4 high school boys at the solar center to help do grunt work. Tim and Jim, the other UD kids, are also visiting the solar center this week and helping us on our projects.
It seems like this week will be pretty busy!
Take care!
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