On the Prinzapolka River in Nicaragua

The second part of our Nicaraguan adventure began with another round of weighing bags in preparation for the very weight restricted flight to Siuna, a small town in the Northern Autonomous Region (reservation of indiginous people.)  Get 30 lbs for checked bag and 20 for personal, to include our tents, clothing, toiletries, and all the educational materials I am bringing.

Dirk headed for our 12 person plane----very professionally run and no longer scary!  Not even the dirt landing field in the middle of town!

After a day of shopping in Siuna to obtain these buckets to hold my "kits," we packed up the back of the rig in dust proof containers and took the 3 hour drive to Alamikamba, the town where our NGO headquarters are and the jumping off point for our trip down the Prinzapolka river.

Got to trust the driver as one cannot trust the roads!  Note the passenger aside of this logging truck!

An attempt to show the depth of the potholes.  Slow going and hard on shocks and backs!

Once at Headquarters, Dixie jumped right into training and explaining and show and tell on all the educational aids she brought.  Jessmara will be the Health Promoter who will use the educational materials throughout the year to teach sanitation and personal hygiene.  Freddy did the translation, but Jessmara secretly knows English (although she won't speak it) so Freddy had it easy!

Another health promoter and all round good guy, Marvin, helped Dirk and I test out disclosing tablets which turn the plaque on your teeth red!  We were preparing for the dental training the next day.

Dix had an all day training with dental brigadistas from remote communities all up and down the river.  Idea was to give them educational tools so that they could start trying to do more preventative care and less yanking of rotten teeth.  It was awesome to meet these people who provide care with very old dental equipment and very little professional support.

Met with the kids of Alamikamba to test out my kid teaching material about germs and hygiene and.......

dental care.  My giant mouth and toothbrush were a big hit and very useful toos.  My badges for the "Sanitation Team" were a hit with other team members as the trip progressed.

After three days in Alamikamba, the Medical Teams International Team arrived.....Three nurses from Canada and one from Puyallup, of all places!  They were a great group!

Over the next 6 days we visited 6 communities along the river, repeating the process of unloading and loading our personal, educational, and medical gear from the pangas, amidst kids and beasts and a very toasty sun.

I was excited that a government hygiene "technician" accompanied our group.  Her task was to mix up and pass out chlorox to families that they would then use to sanitize their water.  I teamed up with her to teach about related sanitation issues such as the concept of the invisible germ and the reason for handwashing.  She watched me a lot and ended up expressing a lot of interest in continuing my teaching techniques.  I very much hope she can!

One of the many cute river kids in her church dress, having done some coloring of evil looking germs!

Each community provided us with food cooked in their homes.  Here is a hock of a paca, a small pig/rodent like forest animal that we ate for lunch and dinner.

This meal included the inevitable white rice and gas-free beans, plus river turtle and dumplings (bowl with spoon and hand) plus fried iguana bits (on right of rice bowl) plus a potato salad with canned tuna.....all reasonably good except the white rice.

After an appropriately dirty game of germ baseball, my enthusiastic dentist/Miskito translator helped me to march all the players over to my handwashing station and teach them how to wash their hands correctly to kill all those hidden germs.

While I had a captive audience and a great translator, I thought I would throw in some spontaneous dental education.  The little puppy enjoyed eating the demonstration egg that popped in mid performance!

Spanish-Miskito speaking dentist, who came along as a pharmacist for the medical team, explained the rules of germ baseball and how the objective, home base, is a healthy smile.  To get there you have to run the bases of tooth brushing, tooth swishing, and good food.  Hows that for propoganda????  The Nic kids are great baseball players and this was perhaps my best teaching tool!

Well, OK, the other best teaching tool was my buckets.  No use teaching how to wash hands if there is no place to wash hands. So in each town I set up a handwashing station.  Seems like a no-brainer since we were providing medical care, but even the Nicaraguan medical personnel did not even think about washing their hands.  I have left my buckets and instructions for setting up more permanent washing facilities for villages.  We will see......

While I was busy teaching, Dirk became a valuable part of the medical team.  Here he is with a family wanting care, an English-Spanish translator, and a Spanish-Miskito translator, and one of the MTI nurses sitting in.  Medical care is a different ballgame in these communities, where everyone comes to the rare health brigades whether they are sick or not!

Here we are running a game of germ ball.  Dixie's translator, Marcus, was also a terrific germ ball pitcher and organizer.  We were so happy that both boys and girls and kids of assorted ages joined us in our games....always in the midst of cows, pigs, chickens, and their poopies.

Dirk gets an installment of toilet paper from our Canadian friend, Avril.  Very important stuff, especially near the end of the trip when GI issues start to take their effect.  Our campsite here was the unfinished interior of a large church.

Dirk and I standing beside the Prinzapolka River in Alamikamba.  Will be back next year to follow up on this year and to launch additional educational tool kits.  We will look forward to working with all the dedicated Nicaraguans again, and if we are lucky, some of our Canadian nursing friends!

Santo Tomas, Nicaragua

Our trip to Santo Tomas, Nicaragua, was filled with visits to the many worthwhile projects of the Community Development Committee that is supported by our Olympia TCSTSCA.  Dirk quickly skirted around his problem of having no Spanish speaking skills by playing with puzzles with the preschoolers. Apparently airplane and truck noises sound good in any language!

For 5 afternoons Dirk and his Spanish teacher met in the Comedor Infantil and hammered away at beginning Spanish.  Since his teacher knew no English, Dirk relied on his I-phone translator as a helper when they got stuck.

We quickly got in the groove of rice and beans or beans and rice.  Our host "mother," Facunda, was great at adding interesting accompanyments and catering to our desire for fresh produce. Here the locally grown melon and the fresh squeezed orange juice were a great delight.  We also learned to like the little green things on the left, called jocote, but liked even better making jokes about Santa Claus saying "jo-jo-jo-cote."

The primary reason for our trip to Santo Tomas was to visit the community library funded by Dirk's Westside Rotary Club.  This sign recognizes the "contribution to the literacy of the Nicaraguan town."  We were truly impressed at what an infusion of a few thousand dollars could do for the education of the community.

The two librarians, supported by funds from the Olympia TCSTSCA, used the $2000 grant to purchase close to 200 books to support the primary and secondary schools of Santo Tomas.  Since classrooms and kids do not own textbooks, the students come to this community library and use the books on site.  The purchase included all sorts of text books on many subjects and lots of literature at many levels as well.  Money very well spent!

After so much hard work in the hot Nicaraguan "summer,"  Dirk took a much needed siesta in the back yard of our host family.

While Dirk siesta-ed and took Spanish lessons, Dixie offered four nutrition classes to patients and staff at the Clinic Popular.  The staff learned to interpret and enhance her bad Spanish and somehow she muddled through with no bilingual translators.

An extremely impressive project is the daily feeding of about 120 kids at the Comedor Infantil.  Especially impressive is that the cooks are volunteers who use these model wood burning stoves to do volume cooking.  Although the staples of rice and beans are always available, the program struggles to provide protein foods and only serves dairy foods four times a month.  Veggies and fruit are on the menu about half the time.  It would be great to get funding to round out the menu that often is the primary meal for some of the poor kids.

We had a fun potluck evening with these recipients of college scholarships from Olympia's TCSTSCA.  Thirty dollars apiece per month enables these students to attend universities and technical institutes.  Very enterprising kids. Played a great game called cabbage....remind us to teach you how!

Got to visit one of the school teachers who visited Olympia two years ago.  She now has a baby!  It was great to see her in her own environs and to be served a lovely meal in her home......fried chicken and rice and beans!  Our host mom took us by bus for this visit, conditioning us for our future 4 hour bus ride to Managua.

Side benefit of touring the projects was sampling the products of this baking school class!  Small enterprises like home cake baking can bring helpful supplements to a family's income.

After a few frustrating learning games, Dirk and I learned the favorite Nicaraguan card game, Desmoche, from Facunda and Jose Maria.  We got the hang of it and it served as a social lubricant on the second half of our Nicaraguan trip.

Facunda helped me to fulfill a longterm goal, the making of tortillas from scratch using nixtamalization.  Here we rubbed down the corn after it had been boiled and soaked in calcium salts, "cal."

After a night of soaking and an early morning trip to the neighborhood corn grinder, we produced these not too shabby tortillas!

And used the coals to make beef "al carbon" for a hearty breakfast!

In preparation for our upcoming river trip, Facunda used her ancient Singer sewing machine, foot pedal powered, to repair my falling apart tote bag.  The machine was just like my mom's and worked very much like my super modern one except that it does not require electricity.

Had some laughs on our last night trying to get Jose Maria to smile!  It was amazing to get to live with such gracious hosts who were tolerant of our communication challenges, proud of their lives and accomplishments, and a lot of fun to be with.

Congaree NP to Tennessee

Made it to Congaree National Park......there is a reason you have not heard of it!  It is a biodiversity preserve, but does not have a lot of drama and had just been hit hard by an ice storm, which shut down most of its scanty trail system.  Were going to spend the night, but moved on.

Took the scenic route through South Carolina and were delighted to have some serious elevation and to discover dense groves of rhodedendrons.....oh, to be there in June when they bloom!  I am now embarrassed by Washington's much skimpier groves of its official state flower!

Made a surprise call on long lost relatives....Dirk's aunt and cousin and her husband.....the later being our kids' age. Had a fun southern dinner in Hendersonville, So. Carolina.

Headed for the Smokey Mountains and attempted to take the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, only to find it closed 8 miles in. Here is what it looks like.....very brown!  The east is brown in the winter!!!!

The Smokey Mountains really did live up to their name, although they appear smokier on a sultry summer day.  Somehow the blue haze helps to disguise the endless brown.

A hike through the woods of Smokey Mtn Natl Park led to this discovery in a big mud puddle.....over 60 egg blobs, including this "black sheep/ugly duckling" egg sack.  Think they are frogs, but the Smokeys are actually famous for their salamanders!

With great excitement we found we were able to hook up with the Appalachian trail and hike a section of it in the park!

Our hike was cut short at about 1.5 miles when the trail turned into an ice skating rink with minimal room for maneuvering around the ice.  Dirk was feeling sick too, so we turned around and headed for lower elevations in the park.

Despite the snow and ice of a few weeks past, we hit a balmy weekend in the park and took this 11 mile scenic bike ride, much of which was past historic pastures and historic pioneer buildings relocated to sites along the way.

Interrupted our bike ride to do a 5 mile hike to these falls.  After flat Florida, the up and down roads and trails and tumbling rivers were a treat as well as a challenge!

Dipped into some local country store goodies in this rural farm country.

And then took a detour to Atlanta to visit Dixie's sister in law's mom, Melba Bolin.  Played tourist in the daytime and scrabble in the night time.  Here are some delicious Atlanta biscuits from the "best biscuit house in Atlanta,"  The Flying Biscuit!  Part of a chicken pot pie!  Yum!

Took a break from the out of doors to do a little broadcast on our worldly adventures!

Cruised the Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta.  Drove our car to a remote subway stop and used the metro system to get around in the town.  No traffic hassles!

Even made our way to the Center for Disease Control museum---very interesting once you break through the high level security.

Was interested to see this public health poster from about 100 years ago. It is almost identical to the education material that I am taking to Nicaragua next week to teach about sanitation!

Then a zigzag back north to Kentucky to hit another eastern national park. This one was terrific!  And good in cold weather!

Only way to access the park is to take a ranger-led tour, so we took 2 of them, or about 4 hours worth.  The cave is not highly decorated, but is fascinating due to its mammoth size....over 400 mile of passageways.

The cave is formed by underground rivers that then flow out of the limestone onto the surface, like this spring.   Yes, those are icicles!

One of our Ranger guides was from the area and had the greatest accent. We learned what a "holler" is....here is the side of a sinkhole that forms a hollow.  Did I mention that the east is incredibly brown in winter?

Then off to cousin Carolyn's house, with a detour to the Grand Ol' Opry.  It was not as much a character place as we were expecting....in fact, it was in the middle of a mall and hotel complex.....quite odd.

However, it is still apparently the home of country music and on our backstage tour we got to stand on the sacred circle where all the famous entertainers stand to sing.

We were hosted by Dixie's cousin Carolyn and her husband Al and enjoyed laughing and fake crying with their special needs son, Josh.  We really got to know them well as we were snowed in for a day after our expected departure. We had a fun and relaxing time in their lovely home.

Also in Nashville got to reconnect with a family from Kris and Rick's playgroup in Olympia.  Had not seen the Doves in 25 years and enjoyed catching up!

Then off we went on the last two days of phase II. We headed down the Natchez Trace, a historic roadway with limited access and lots of special stops along the way.  It is managed by the National Park Service.  We enjoyed this slightly icy hike to Jackson Falls, named after Andrew Jackson who used this trace/trail to move his troops.

An important stop for me was the burial site of Meriweather Lewis, who probably committed suicide in a cabin here.  The broken obelisk is symbolic of his short broken life.  He and Clark are definitely my heroes, so his death is very sad to me.

A little cheerier was David Crockett State Park, closed up for the season but still displaying informative kiosks about when Davey moved his family here to farm.

So glad the weather has warmed up to 35.  It was easier to break off the icicles!

This cold weather sucks!  It is time to go to the tropics!  Nicaragua, here we come!