Community Organizers

Building Houses

Fighting Hunger

Trip Report, Day 1 Morning: El Crucero

"Chuck" Charlie Sauer

Keith, Mel, Jim and I stayed at a very pleasant "Best Western" hotel literally across the street (Carretera Norte) from the airport in northeast Managua. Carretera Norte ("North Highway") runs east to west across the northern part of the city. We left the hotel about 7:30 a.m. and drove west through rush hour traffic about 15 kilometers to the other side of Managua, and then south on Carretera Panamericana to Rainbow's office for the El Crucero network. Though rustic, the office has computers, filing cabinets, a fax machine, and so forth, much like other small businesses. At El Crucero we met Nelson and several other staff members who accompanied us the rest of the day.

Carretera Norte is mostly paved. The highway from Managua to El Crucero is mostly better paving than Carretera Norte. Most of the rest of the day we would be on dirt roads or worse. The road to Los Fierros, our first destination community, was dirt but well graded and quite passable.

First stop in Los Fierros was a clinic where Dr. Dr. Martha Iris Obando Mejía was seeing patients during her half-day consult there. The top three medical problems she described are hypertension, arthritis and diabetes. Mel talked and talked about Dr. Mejía the rest of the trip: how she impressed with her compassion, discretion and sensibility.

Prevalence of hypertension was a surprise, but prepared me to better understand later about a 7 year old stroke victim. Thanks to Rainbow's doctors he recovered dramatically — the next day when we met him and his mother we saw him running!

Before entering Los Fierros, we had stopped at a dirt floor wooden shack. The family there graciously allowed us to see inside and better understand their plight. The dirt was dry and hard that day, but would be mud during the rainy season (May-November). I still shudder to think of them sleeping in that mud, with more rain coming down through the leaky roof. Our last stop in Los Fierros was the 1 year-old Rainbow housing project. We visited the home of the housing coordinator. Unlike his family's former dirt floor abode, presumably similar to the one we'd seen an hour earlier, their new house was livable. They sleep on a concrete floor instead of dirt and mud, and have real walls and roof to keep the rain out.

dirt floor shack

Introductions

Leaving Los Fierros, we dropped in at a public health presentation in a community called "San Ramón" (not the town of San Ramón northeast of Managua). There was a mixture of shacks and new concrete buildings shown at left. Often there are ad hoc wood additions to the concrete buildings, so outside appearances can be misleading. This video clip is included here mainly because of the laughter and joking during the introductions.

The feeding center is next to that home. There is a sink with running water and instructions for hand washing. There are more children than places to sit, so they eat in two shifts.