in rural Haiti

I had one of the assignments in Haiti that I really enjoy - where I get to go out to visit some of the communities where we do our development work.  Always so much more satisfying than sitting in the office looking at documents.

The journey to this particular community was not an easy one, up steep, rocky tracks that apparently become so slippery as to be impassable after rain, and a short spell driving through what had become a seasonal river following Hurricane Matthew last year.


I couldn't capture it in my photos but in places the track was so steep that I held on tight, nervous that we wouldn't make it.


But the driver was very good - and used to this kind of road I suppose.  Even he, however, couldn't get around the obstacle that faced us around the next corner:

It had seemingly fallen onto the track from the hillside above, and there was no way of driving around it.  Thankfully we were two vehicles, with a number of young men, and after some considerable effort they moved the rock off the track.

Finally at the community, I met some of the community management committee, a group of people who had realised that if the community were to develop, they had to organise themselves to make this happen.  As the community leader told me, "The government have abandoned us".  Apparently the teachers have not been paid for the last three years.

Their small community school was paid for with donated funds a few years back, and at the end of my visit I went to verify the existence of a filing cabinet and some teaching materials we had delivered to them at the start of the school year. They told me proudly that they had just succeeded in getting their first pupil to university.  This was quite astonishing when I saw that there were not even any desks or chairs for the children to sit at, and the school principal said quietly that he was very happy with what we had provided - but that he would really like a desk.  I thought of him when I was booking my flight for my next work assignment in Brazil.  There was a flight home departing Sao Paulo at midday; another flight was departing at 05:24, meaning a night without sleep before the seven hour flight home. But taking the early flight would save $200, and who knows what difference $200 could make to that tiny community school.  Certainly every little bit helps.  & it's good to be reminded, every so often, of the realities of life "in the field"- for those who will never in their lifetimes even dream of the kind of life I've had.

getting lost in Panama

In my ridiculously busy schedule of the last few months, I had a weekend in Panama in between trips to Nicaragua and Haiti.  I could have sat at home and rested, but the apartment was a mess as the landlord had moved all my stuff as he worked on fixing the ceiling (although he had removed and painted over the mould before fixing the pipe above where the water was leaking from so the mould was already starting to regrow amongst the drips ... sigh ... such is Panama) so I decided to go out for the day.

We have a few Whatsapp groups for different interests, one of which is Panama Hike and Beer.  I don't like beer but they were running a hike on the Saturday described as "easy" so I joined them.  It started off easy - a local bus to a nearby town, a climb over a low fence, a jump over the litter, and we were in a patch of rainforest with a sort-of trail.  Just five of us, which was nice.  After walking for an hour so so we reached a stream, and the others proceeded to cross it, stepping carefully from one (slippery) rock to another.  I pondered turning back at this stage, but they persuaded me to stay with them - but without making it clear that we were now going off trail, to rely just on the GPS of the hike leader to make it back to some form of civilisation.

To cut quite a long (six hour) story short, the features marked on the GPS (such as a road) didn't seem to be there, whilst lots of fallen trees, streams, thick rainforest vegetation interspersed in places with thick reeds growing to above head height were there.  It was quite a tough hike.  The leader kept saying we were x metres from a road, but the best we found was a stony track that disappeared into nothing.  Then we saw a sign in the distance, and were hopeful that we had reached at least the edge of civilisation, but a closer view revealed this:

... a warning to keep out because of unexploded ordinance!

So we gave that area a wide berth.  We had no choice but to keep going though, as we would never have been able to follow our winding route back and by now we were running very low on water, and two of the five seemed close to heat stroke.  Still trying to follow the GPS (with the battery charge nearly gone), we got to a rather wider stream - more like a small canal.  There was a dammed area which we were able to cross, and an abandoned lighthouse came into view higher up the slope ahead.  We pushed on.

& to our relief (well, you knew I made it out or I wouldn't have been writing this) we hit a cleared area with a road, and some way beyond it the Cocolí Locks of the Panama canal.  We collapsed beside the road for a while in the shade of a tree, but then flagged down a passing vehicle.  It turned that we were inside the restricted zone of the canal.  Before long a security vehicle came along with a policeman and a canal security person inside, and of course they stopped to question us.  Turned out that we were not the first foreigners to somehow find ourselves in the restricted zone, and we were not arrested but rather escorted out onto a public road where we were able to find a taxi.

Quite an experience, and not one that the hike leader has shared with other people signed up to his Whatsapp group!

yet another corner of Nicaragua - the Indio Maíz Reserve

After so many weeks away I was entitled to a little compensatory leave, and joined up with a birding trip to a very remote corner of Nicaragua.  The Indio Maíz Reserve is on the Caribbean side of the country, just north of Costa Rica.  Nobody really goes there apart from a few fishermen (and perhaps the drug smugglers who are rumoured to use this sparsely populated coast to get their drugs from Costa Rica to Honduras, on the way up to the US), and there is only a small population of indigenous people, who are remote enough from the main part of the country that they speak English creole rather than Spanish.  Even the settlements that had been there were fading away.

If you can't read that (even in extra large size the writing is small and faint) it concludes with a note that the British cemetery was used until the 1980's.  This is what it looks like now:

In this state partly through neglect, but partly because of Hurricane Otto that hit last November - the southernmost hurricane on record in Central America which made landfall right where the lodge is located.

Unfortunately the company I was travelling with had not heard about the hurricane.  So the itinerary I read in late March, with its references to 8km of trails around the lodge in pristine rainforest, and much more primary rainforest to view mostly from a small boat, where we could see all kinds of rainforest birds not to mention otters, tapirs and perhaps even manatees, still reflected the situation pre-hurricane and was, frankly, a load of rubbish.  There was only a 1km trail that was passable, and even that just passed through a post-apocalyptic landscape of broken vegetation.  This is a view from the river.

Hardly a dense, pristine rainforest.

However it was quite fascinating to see the effects - how powerful nature can be - as this forest will surely take decades to regenerate.  We all tried to make the most of it and our poor guide, as well as predicting that we will get sizeable refunds, made superhuman efforts to find us birds so I was able to add Great Green Macaw, Nicaraguan Seed-finch, Masked Duck and Least Bittern to my life list - all of which are pretty difficult to see.  The green basilisks and the green and black poison dart frogs were pretty cool too!

visiting home and family

I was going to post something about my recent time (nearly four weeks) in the UK, but it was so depressing that I really don't want to.  Let's just say it was very cold, and too right wing.  I was glad to get away.

Although London will always be my favourite city, in part because of the amazing variety of culture there.  On my first day back I went to an exhibition of world music photography (which the Royal Albert Hall kindly let me and another woman in to view, even though it had officially closed the previous day), and then that evening to a concert by Bassekou Kouyate, Seckou Touré and others (an Afro-Cuban thing) that was superb.  If I'd had time I would also have gone to see Orchestra Baobab, Leftfield, and a talk by Yanis Varoufakis.

& being in the UK of course gave me the opportunity to visit my Dad, which is always nice.  Lots of discussions on politics, which can get heated but always remain discussions rather than arguments.

Then, just one week after spending time with my Dad, I was with my Mum in Kenya!  Probably the first time in thirty years that I have seen both of my parents within the same month, let alone within a week!!  Nice to visit her too, with lots of discussions on the pros and cons of living in a different country and culture.