El Bote, Nicaragua, January 24th, 3013

After a series of individually minor, but cumulatively time-consuming delays we arrived tonight in El Bote after about 12 hours on the road. El Bote is about as remote a place as there is on this, the Pacific side of the cordillera which divides Nicaragua (the Atlantic side is cialis online without prescription largely true wilderness, except along the coast).

There is a lot of history here, and history is kind of what brought us here

in the first place. The rural development cooperative with which we work, Asociación de Trabajadores para Desarrollo Rural- Benjamin Linder (ATDER-BL)  http://www.atder-bl.org/        is named in memory a mechanical engineer working on a small-scale hydroelectric project, one of of the first US citizens killed by the US-backed Contras during the civil war in the eighties. A friend of mine who knew Ben Linder suggested this site, and put us in touch with ATDER-BL, which now so values and supports our work here that they contribute $1000 / year toward the rental of 4WD vehicles to get our team here. This is a prodigious effort on their part (many Nicaraguan families live on less than $1000 / year), and an example of the recruitment of local resources that can occur as a project matures and becomes reliably recurrent.

Boanerge Rocha is an impressive young man who was working for ATDER-BL as an agronomist in watershed management when we first met him six years ago. He was so interested in, and inspired by our work here that he decided to become a veterinarian himself, and when we arrived tonight, one of the first things he showed us was his degree as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Central Nicaragua University.  Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti), but some things are progressing here.

Tomorrow we begin work on the local baseball field, and expect to see between 100 and 150 animals.

David Turoff, DVM

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This