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.
