Puerto Morazan, Nicaragua

It's Wednesday morning, and I'm sitting in the front room of my host family. I've just noticed that the time on my computer says 8:30am. Strange. The clock on the wall says 10:15, and I'm pretty sure that my computer clock is right. My pocket watch has been intermittently functional over the last few days, a quality not especially useful in a watch. That does however mean that I went to bed at 8pm last night, not the 9.45pm I thought previously. Lightweight.

Francisco, my host, is a teacher at the local school. He is charmingly adorable. He just left to go to school, on his motorbike. Actually, no he didn't, I can see it outside. Last night he did pick up his papa from "the fields" and afterwards his wife, Virginia, on it. There aren't really any cars around here, in Tonalá. I reckon there certainly aren't more than 100 in the whole municipality, of 15,000 people. Those that there are are pick-up trucks. A fair few motorbikes, and lots of bikes though. And buses between the towns.

So the place I'm staying is Tonalá, not Puerto Morazán. I'm here because my home city, Bristol, is twinned with Puerto Morazán. Through the Bristol Link with Nicaragua (BLINC), I'm spending a couple of weeks here. Although it would be nice to spend a month here, the car has 30 days in the country and I've been in León for a week already. And afterwards I want to visit Damian on Ometepe, a twin-volcano island in the Lago de Atitlan, the world's largest freshwater lake.

So it appears that the municipality of Bristol (denoted by the local council, Bristol City Council) is twinned with the municipality of Puerto Morazán. Confusingly, that includes the town of Puerto Morazán, as well as the surrounding villages. Further, the administrative offices are in Tonalá. It's taken me a couple of days to get my head around all of this.

It's quite a shift to be figuring stuff out for myself. For one, a shift from the daily routine of getting up and going to the beach. But also from the 'development' gap year work I did in Nepal 9 years ago (wow, it was that long ago), as well as the Education solidarity delegation in did in Colombia 3 years ago. Both of the latter were more guided and led, with a lot of presentations, talks and explanatory workshops. That is mainly due to the fact that then I was part of organised groups.

I feel like coming here wasn't quite so big a shock, or shift, as flying from the UK to Colombia, out of one culture and into another, quite different, in 24 hours. I've had 6 months to feel my way along and into this life. That's has been the truly wonderful thing about this trip so far, and by avoiding flying, is noticing the gradual, subtle differences (cultural and socio-economic) as I creep along. Nonetheless, getting off the tourist trail has, like I said, been a shift of gears, and is a culture switch of different sorts.

I can see the difficulties that have been faced in the past by representation of solidarity campaigns. There have been issues when people from the UK have represented the Colombia Solidarity Campaign while in Colombia, and then said and done reprehensibly stupid, or at least naive, things. This had consequences for representing the Campaign in a negative light in Colombia, and also facilitated internal factional rifts at home. So, to be in this position myself, as representing BLINC, is a step I take with a heavy weight of responsibility.

So I can see how these difficulties have arisen. It feels like a minefield, what should I say, what shouldn't I say, who should I talk to, who shouldn't I talk to, and what the hell am I doing here in the first place? I feel like really I should have looked more closely at the BLINC website, on their stance and angle on the solidarity and development work the do. I know that they try and facilitate exchanges, and have helped equip and fund local schools.

Well, I'm here for my own reasons, that I'm pretty sure are more than compatible with BLINC's. After discussion with Alix, the Chair of the Bristol Twinnings Association and a comrade in the Bristol Latin America Forum (whose blog is incidentally getting a fantastic spread and volume of hits from around the world), I decided to try and make a short film about Puerto Morazán. Additionally, wanting to get my hands dirty, I was to try and help the Lucrecia Lindo shrimp farming co-operative, who have suffered storm damage from Hurricane Mitch, and also to have a chat with the new incoming Executive Mayor about their development priorities for the next 5 years, to present an informal report to Bristol City Council.

So last week, I emailed BLINC's local contact in León, to discuss my arrangements while I'd be here. Having waited 5 days, on Monday I found the address of the office and popped in. It turns out I had an incorrect email address. So, from there, after a phone call, it was arranged that someone would pick me up from Chinandega, the nearest large town to both León and Puerto Morazán, roughly half way between the two. So I met Norma, who would turn out to also be on the new Council Board.

I drove us to Tonalá, where she said it would be better that I stayed, and she arranged to put me up here, with Francisco and his lovely family. All this took a little while, with nonchalant efficiency, given that this was all being done without any of their prior knowledge. I felt bad about this, all happening on the spot. WIth hindsight, I wonder if had I announced my arrival 3 months previous whether this would have made any difference.

Explaining to Norma that I would like to help the women's shrimp farming co-operative, we drove to Puerto Morazán from Tonalá, a 20 minute drive down an occasionally bumpy, straight dirt road. I could see the lagoons on either side, some of which were decidedly dry. We arrived, and parked the car in the shade - at 2pm, it was around 34ºC. I'll spare the details of who and how, but we arranged that I'd meet the co-operative for Tuesday at noon, after meeting the new Alcadia (local Council).

So yesterday being Tuesday, I awoke and made my way to the Council building for 10am. A single storey concrete block, the Alcadia is not quite on the same scale as its equivalent in Bristol. That's a heritage of slavery and capitalist exploitation to thank for that. As I arrived, my contact from Leon was there to take a photo of the new administration. It turns out I was here for their inaugural cabinet meeting, the new administration for 2009-2012. They were a friendly bunch, and I tried hard to avoid comparing them to Bristol's Board. Somehow I felt closer and more alike to these people, from a rural municipality in Nicaragua, than to Bristol's elected representatives. Maybe it's my quasi-diplomatic status here, or something else, I'm not quite sure.

I observed the meeting, the details of which I'll spare you. Meetings are the same the world over - being at them is one thing, usually a fairly necessary evil, but reading about them is quite unnecessarily pestilent. I want to keep what little readers I have at this stage. Suffice to say that this is the steep learning curve that I need to improve my Spanish further at the moment. It's come on leaps and bounds since being in Central America, and pushing it further is pretty hard work. Maybe that's why I'm sleeping 10 hours a night.

Afterwards, I went back over to Puerto Morazán, to meet with the shrimp farmer co-operative. In the back of my mind, I wondered on the way over why Alix had suggested this lot in particular to work with. I said I was up for getting my hands dirty, and this was a suggestion. While driving over the day previous with Norma I questioned the appropriateness of a bloke helping out a women's group, but she quickly put my mind to rest. She said that women here were emancipated and liberated, that it really wasn't an issue.

So I got to Gloria's house, and the lady we met the day previous was there, along with Gloria. Not quite the 16-strong co-operative I had been led to expect. So we had a chat, getting some plastic chairs out in the shade in front of Gloria's house. I found out more about the co-operative, and the history of the relationship between BLINC and them. Without literally pushing the issue, I suppose my presence did. It seemed like the explanation I got was a explanation for the absence of action going on. From what I understood, BLINC had given a bunch of money to help legalise ownership of their land, and buy a boat. It seems like now, they need a bunch more money in order to actually get started, for machinery and suchlike. It appears that it all cost more than previously thought.

So this was the crunch. I felt my representation of BLINC and my level of involvement with them at home under irreconcilable tension. I explained that my role here was to offer practical help, for a week or so, to help repair storm damage that I suppose had been offered as an explanation for inaction in the past. Hurricane Mitch was in 1999, 10 years ago. I wondered how long had they been off-line? This is precisely why funding overseas 'development' work is so fraught with complicated ethical issues.

In return for my gentle prodding that elicited a diplomatically defensive response, it was my turn to take the back foot. I explained my level of involvement with BLINC as truthfully as I could, through the Bristol Latin America Forum as cross-solidarity work. I also felt a bit guilty in explaining the last 5 months of my time as constructively as possible. So sensing that doing anything practical with this group was not forthcoming, we agreed to meet tomorrow at 6am to go for a tour of the lagoons. This would be a great time to get some footage and photos for the film.

The film... is going to be a tricky one. I have a Canon Powershot S70 camera. It takes 10 frames per second of 640x352 video, approximate to a cameraphone. I think that it can work though. It'll have to be short, and snappy, and be led by a strong narrative. As long as it's viewed on computer screens, it'll be fine. Which if the target audience is for kids in posh Bristol schools and the Council, it will be. The hard part will be the editing, which takes time. But time is something I'm not short of really.