Mar
All good playground projects must come to an end. After three days, 40 hours of group labor and weeks of pre-expedition planning, the students at the Fabretto Children’s Foundation school in Cusmapa, Nicaragua, have a first-class playground.
The playground’s dedication, followed by children swarming in their Sunday clothes:
An an earlier, one-minute video tour of the just-completed playground from a few weeks earlier:
Under the guidance of a talented and unbelievably hard-working crew from the PBS affiliate in Boston, the Roadmonkey team worked with students, teachers and parents to create the playground, almost entirely from locally purchased materials. PBS joined our volunteer project, designed the playground and filmed its construction for a newly created program to show kids the beauty of using engineering for worthy community projects.
Mil gracias a Judy Lee & Adam Vollmer & Dorothy Dickie and their efficient and spirited Boston-based team. You guys were a pleasure to work with. Jason and Marsela and Nora of Fabretto: your hospitality and patience were beyond the call. Thank you.
We. Are. Very. Tired.
Goodnight from Nicaragua…
Paul
Mar
The playground we’re constructing at the Fabretto Children’s Foundation school here in Cusmapa is coming together nicely. We are on schedule and plan to finish the tree fort, the spinning wheel, the tire swing, the other swing set, the hideout hut, the balance beam and the musical drums today…if you can believe it. We have faith. It will be done. It is good.
Christina checks her calculations as she helps install tree fort support beams.
The Roadmonkey crew is basically 10 people, including me and my co-leader, Juan Flores of San Diego (aka Juan Pablo Escobar because of the cheesy drug-kingpin shades he bought from a vendor down in San Juan del Sur). Juan, I and Stephanie (aka Estefani) have been the swingset-install team; Deborah J., Kim, Zaby aka Raby, and Carolee have been roaming from the musical drums to the spinning disk; meanwhile, over on the tree fort, Christina, Emily and Deborah R. have been hammering, measuring and drilling their way toward a structure that integrates two large trees into the heart of the fort. The students here are already in love with it.
Drill, baby, drill...
These students have put a lot of work into this playground, which was designed from our construction partners here, a PBS crew from Boston that is filming the building process for an upcoming program. In the process of our cooperative work with the students, we’ve started to get to know them ever so slightly, through bashfulness and initial reticence, to the point where they’ve taken a liking to a few Roadmonkeys in particular.
Roadmonkey Stephanie, aka Estefani, is a princess in the eyes of these girls.
The women on our crew are the natural magnets to the Fabretto students, whether girls or boys, making eye contact and trading questions with them and posing for photos much more easily than with the gringo men.
Amigas por la vida. (Friends for life.)
Each of our first two work days have been long: we rise at 6am, eat as much breakfast as we can, knowing lunch is five hours and a hot sunny morning away, and then break for an hour lunch at noon. Then we’re back to work by 1pm, working through the afternoon heat and dust, into dusk and then darkness. We’ve been wrapping up around 6:45pm, working by fluorescent light bulb when necessary, to ensure we stay on schedule.
The remains of the work day.
After our 12-hour workdays, we shower and eat an excellent dinner, prepared by the Fabretto house manager and cook, Nora. That’s usually followed by a round, or three, or more, of Toña beer, the group’s preferred Nica brew. I think we and the PBS people have plowed through about 70, beers after quittin’ time since Wednesday night.
All well deserved, mind you.
- Paul
Mar
Greetings from San Jose de Cusmapa, the highest elevated inhabited place in Nicaragua. It’s been a wonderful four days of surfing in San Juan del Sur, on the southern Pacific coast. We’ve now arrived in Cusmapa, to begin building a playground in cooperation with our non-profit partner, the Fabretto Children’s Foundation.
But before I tell you all about the playground — which is going to be an incredible set of structures by Saturday night — please allow a brief recapitulation of the Roadmonkey surfing experience. In the photo below, Team Roadmonkey is doing its best Duke Kahanamoku impression, flanked by instructors (from left) Anna from Holland; Jonny from England; and Alfredo from Peru. (Juan Flores, the Roadmonkey co-leader, is the guy lying in the sand.) As the saying goes: The best surfer is the one having the most fun. By that measure, we were the best surfers in Nicaragua this week.
Roadmonkeys with their surboards at Playa Maderas, bookended by their instructors.
The group took advantage of one afternoon break, on Monday, to either relax by the pool of our surf lodge, called Mango Rosa, or take a 17-platform zipline canopy tour along the wild Nica coastline.
Christina Z. zipping down a Nicaraguan canopy tour, San Juan del Sur.
On Tuesday, our final day in the water, we resumed our surfing lessons. The water was unusually chilly. The sun, though, was radiant. Several Roadmonkeys caught waves. And vice-versa.
Stephanie S. and her very expressive wipeout, on Tuesday.
Then it was time to drive north to San Jose de Cusmapa, where we were scheduled to begin building a playground the following morning at a school run by the Fabretto Children’s Foundation. On the way north, we stopped for a roadside lunch. Even roadside lunch stands here have chefs, cooking chicken, pork, beef tongue, plantains and gallo pinto, the Nica rice staple.
Classic Nica lunch fare, on the road to Cusmapa.
After a long drive and a good night’s rest, it was playground-building time, working with not only Fabretto and the students at the school where this playground is being built, but also with a PBS crew from Boston, which designed the playground and is filming the construction for a new program to air early next year.
Kim M. digs deep, by hand when necessary, making a 3-foot hole for the swingset foundation.
The Roadmonkey crew, the PBS crew and the Fabretto staff are all housed at the Fabretto house in Cusmapa, a quiet alpine outpost only a few kilometers south of the Honduran frontier (not that there are any roads from here north; Cusmapa is pretty much the end of this particular long and gravelly road).
We began work today, Thursday, after a quick breakfast and sunny morning walk to the Fabretto school, where some 400 children take supplemental classes in English, math, critical thinking and other subjects, to augment their public school studies. In between class, many of the students came to the playground construction site to help us begin the three-day project.
A Fabretto student helps Carolee stack lumber for the Roadmonkey playground.
As Day 1 of this volunteer project ground into afternoon, the Roadmonkey crew and PBS team, including two engineers who designed the playground entirely from locally available materials, fell into a work rhythm that kept the dust, heat and blisters at bay.
Deborah and Emily help build the playground's tree fort foundation.
Part of the reason several Roadmonkey expedition members joined us was to have a chance to work with and interact with the children who will benefit from the playground. In between work assignments, several of us took breaks to talk to the students, mostly in whatever Spanish we could muster, plus a healthy dose of that international language known as talky-pointy.
Zaby aka Raby makes quick friends with a pair of toy walkie talkies.
The first day’s work included organizing into work teams that proceeded to cut lumber, dig holes (with ancient shovels, large pick-axes and heavy iron bars) and mix cement to secure the foundations our swingsets, tree fort and spinning disc, among other structures.
Judy Lee showing Carolee how to use a jigsaw.
The work didn’t end along with the remaining daylight. Instead of stopping at 5pm, we all worked until nearly 7pm, to ensure we stayed on schedule. More from the playground site tomorrow….
Night work: Making sure the posts for the tire swing are aligned & moored in cement.
Mar
Narration will be added later today. For now, we’ll allow the photos to speak for themselves to describe the surfing half of this adventure philanthropy expedition to Nicaragua….
Roadmonkey women (from left) Christina, Deborah, Carolee & Zaby, with Roadmonkey co-leader Juan Flores (left) and surf instructor Jonny Hillyard (blond dude).
Deborah R. catching a beginner wave, aided by Roadmonkey expedition co-leader Juan Flores.
Deborah J. riding high, with instructor Alfredo in the background
Roadmonkeys, from left, Emily, Zaby & Carolee, evalulating the waves.
Okay, we’re off for lesson no. 3 now….more soon.
Stay tuned,
Paul
Mar
Dear Friends,
On Friday, Roadmonkey launches it’s fourth adventure philanthropy expedition, to Nicaragua. Follow our progress here.
The first four days, we’ll learn to surf the mellow waves around San Juan del Sur, on the southern Pacific coast.
Then, on Wednesday, Mar. 9, we caravan six hours north, into the northern highlands, near the Honduran border, to a mountain-top town called San Jose de Cusmapa, to spend three days building a playground for some 400 school children. For most of them, this will be their first-ever playground. We’re building it entirely from local materials, input from the kids in the community. No prefabricated swingsets or slights or monkey bars on this project. To the contrary, this will be a unique, sturdy structure that incorporates Nicaraguan culture, art and homegrown natural woods to create a world-class playground you won’t find anywhere else….because it was custom designed by two professional engineers: Judy Lee and Adam Vollmer (read more on this below).
Our non-profit partner on this adventure philanthropy expedition is the Fabretto Children’s Foundation, which runs the school and which has been a steady, positive presence for poor children in Nicaragua for decades.
Pristine & empty: Playa Yanqui, south of San Juan del Sur.
Our playground building partner is WGBH Boston, the PBS station that has chosen to film this Roadmonkey volunteer project as an episode of a new program showing kids how to use engineering to improve the lives of people in need in creative, sustainable ways.
I will be posting photos and daily updates to our 9-day surfing and playground-building expedition. So please stay tuned to this blog. I’ll also be posting pix & updates – as long as internet connections & bandwidth allow – to Roadmonkey’s Facebook and Twitter pages.
Join us on this unique combination of physical challenge and volunteer work collaboration in Nicaragua. See you in Nica starting Friday!
Sincerely,
PS, If you’re reading this in the stone-cold, slab-gray deadzone known as the Northeastern United States, here’s the forecast for Nica this weekend. And I doubt next week will be any different.
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