Managua

The last few days have been quite a trip. I flew out of Bluefields on friday morning with the French film crew and Guillaume and landed in Managua a few hours later. As we walked out of the airport, G discovered that his phone was out of minutes, so we had to hike down the road a ways to meet up with Victor who would be driving us around in the 'Magi-Boogy,' a rundown diesel van, for the next couple days.

Having arrived after our first meeting was scheduled to begin, we decided to can that one and go straight to the house. On the way, I got my first real glimpse of Managua. It's a pretty intense city. Every stoplight brings a barrage of small children cleaning your windshield, women offering sliced mangoes, cold drinks and trinkets. The roads are full of the most incredible variety of vehicles I've ever seen in one place. There's everything from giant semi trucks to horse drawn carts and foot-pedal rickshaws. The houses are crammed in close, rusted zinc roofs and siding overlapping high walls with barbed wire and broken glass. In certain areas, the broken shells of collapsed houses and apartment buildings frame poorly constructed shacks and empty courtyards. The whole city feels as if it's been under siege for the past 30 years or so. Every home has a high wall of concrete and wrought iron with steel bars across every window and gates closing of each door. There's a tension in the air that mixes with the exhaust and thick, humid air to create a tangible, relentless weight.

Arriving at 'casa Ivan' we were greeted by Rafael, the young caretaker whose job it is to always be in the house. We dropped our bags, discovered the internet had been cut off for no particular reason, made a few phone calls and headed back out again. Guillaume went with the film crew to get his official residency ID after several years of buracracy. I headed off to the grocery store to stock up for the next few days. It was quite a treat to be in a real grocery store with a huge variety of food after a couple weeks in Bluefields where the selection is surprisingly limited.

As soon as I got back to the house, it was time to turn around again and head out for a meeting with Henry, the local architect that I will be working with on the design and construction of CERCA. Unfortunately, our taxi driver wasn't entirely sure where we were headed, so we ended up going by a different INATEC campus before going clear across town to our actual destination. Fortunately, the meeting that followed was well worth the trip! Henry has turned out to be a welcome and refreshing change from the norm or unmotivated and uncooperative individuals that dominate the INATEC offices. Not only had he found me the 3 things I asked for, but he'd gone out of his way to accumulate additional information and compile CDs with examples of hotel school layouts, building terminology and material specs.

With drawings and new material in hand, we headed off to the hotel school that has recently been built with the help of international funding. It was quite a treat to have a tour through the elegant dining room, fully stocked kitchens and 4 star hotel training rooms. Everything they had there was far larger and more upscale than anything we will be doing in Bluefields, but getting a chance to see the possibilities that are available sparked numerous ideas.

When we returned to Henry's office and picked up Guillaume, he was nearly dancing with excitement. He had just coerced his way into a meeting with the head honcho of INATEC and gotten permission to move ahead on a myriad of projects he'd been pushing for for quite a while. I was floored to hear him describe the trajectory of future development that will commence with a reorganization of INATEC-IPCC's existing infrastructure and the construction of CERCA. The vision he described will not only transform the way that training and enterprises occur in Bluefields, but will eventually alter the education system, living conditions and outside perspective of the entire Atlantic coast. There is something truly extraordinary about the way that Guillaume can visualize future endeavors and see how all the interconnected elements can grow together to create real changes.

Hyped up about the possibilities for the future, we came back to the house, cooked a yummy meal and started talking. Many hours later, we moved to the office to start making lists of all the the departments, projects and initiatives that we'd like to include in the development of CERCA and all the associated projects. Somewhere around 3am, still coursing with excitement, we finally called it a night and laid down for a few hours rest before the beginning of another long day.