Spent Sunday playing tourist….

Chelmsford isn’t particularly a famous British city but it is very interesting. The first radio factory was established here in 1912 and there are two very good museums very near my hotel. I discovered my work location is only about a ten minute walk from the hotel and given the size of my VW van and the parking problems I have with it, I may leave it at work during the week and walk back and forth to the hotel.
In the afternoon I went back to the museums when they were open and it just happened 9th Essex Parachute Regiment was having a memorial service. These guys parachuted into Arnhem, Holland during the Normandy Invasion and there aren’t many of them left (not that many lived to the end of the war.) Talked with them a while and showed them some of the photos I had taken at the British cemetery in Thailand at the River Kwai that were still on my digital camera.
I also walked downtown and visited the Chelmsford Cathedral which is very nice and has a moving stained glass memorial to the US airmen who served here and flew missions over Germany during WWII.
The weather right now is beautiful and tomorrow I start working again…..

I was kinda dreading my first cross-country drive over here…..

…..but it went much better than I had dared hope for. I got up early and left Southampton and intentionally took a small off-road north just to get used to open road driving on the left side. The road turned out to be REALLY off-road—a narrow 1 ½-lane blacktop that required pulling off to the side every time I met another vehicle but it sent me through small South England villages that literally looked like postcards. I came across old buildings with thatched roofs, the white stucco buildings with the dark wooden timbers like you see in places like Stratford-upon-Avon, and little traffic circles with the old village wells and hand pumps in the center. Unfortunately I’m driving a Volkswagen mini-bus and almost never had an opportunity to pull over and take pictures but today, at least, the sun was out, the sky was baby blue and the countryside picture perfect.
I made it up to Andover in about an hour and caught a larger 4-lane motorway east towards Amesbury and made great time until the motorway closed down and then it was 45 minutes of stop-and-go driving until I reached the exit for Stonehenge.
I arrived at Stonehenge about 45 minutes after it opened but the crowds were growing already. By the time I left the parking lot was overflowing. The weather was beautiful while I was there and I got some great photos. For a World Heritage Site it is not very developed but also, not very commercialized. I guess since they don’t really know what it was there’s not a lot they can tell visitors but I got an audio headset and walked around the site. As they pointed out this site was ancient when the Romans were here—created about 5050 years ago with some of the stones brought in over 240 miles from Wales. It does match up with the sun so we know that it was used as a calendar and is still incredibly accurate today. It’s thought it may also have been used as a sacrificial altar, an observatory for the heavens, and a memorial to something. It is imposing and very impressive.
After leaving Stonehenge, I made a 2 ½ hour drive to Chelmsford which required my driving to the ring road around London and exiting toward the east coast of the island. It went amazingly well and I found my hotel right off. It’s an old inn—I don’t know how old, but vastly different from the modern hotel I stayed at in Southampton. It’s very quaint, though, and I’m looking forward to spending a week here.
Compared to Southampton, which was destroyed during the war and mostly rebuilt since, Chelmsford is a very old city—the welcome sign says it was authorized as a market town by King John in 1199. It has some old Roman aqueducts and other antiquities and the downtown area looks very “English.” I’m not all that far from Cambridge so if you’re familiar with that area—this is the same architecture.
Tomorrow is Sunday so I’ll get my bearings some more and start my second week of work…..

Finished my first week here in Southampton…..

And overall all went very well but the weather was atrocious. We had overcast skies, very strong winds, pouring rain and cold temperatures but have managed to avoid the flooding that has devastated central England. I may have to deal with that later when I’m driving from Chelmsford to Bristol.

Southampton is a fairly large city and, as all British cities, full of history. It wasn’t raining when I got back to the hotel today so I walked up to the city center and looked around. In addition to the Mayflower and Titanic using this as a port of debarkation it seems over 2 million US soldiers left here for the Continent during World War II—beginning with the Normandy Invasion.

I am beginning to get the hang of the British road system now but am not completely comfortable. I’m working with the national bus company this trip and today got to drive a double-decker bus—not on the street but in the terminal and it is a strange experience. Tonight is my last night here and tomorrow morning I’m going to leave early and drive up to Stonehenge then around London to Chelmsford. Overall this first week has gone well.

The grueling 9+ hour fight to London went ok.....

and I made it to Southampton on schedule. Initially the weather here was typically British—cold, rainy and overcast but Sunday the sun came out and it was very nice. Parts of central England have been having torrential rains and several towns such as Stratford have had serious flooding but not here.
Southampton is a very old city and has been a seaport for most of England’s history. Across from my hotel is one of the world’s largest deep-water ports and there are at least five very, very large cruise ships docked now. This is where the Queen Elizabeth docks in England and the port is so old it was also the disembarkation point for the Mayflower and the Titanic. There are memorials to both ships and today I visited the Maritime Museum which is very strong on exhibits of the old steam equipment for the early ocean-crossing vessels but I didn’t spend a lot of time there. I spent most of the day today walking along the docksides and came across a real British bowling green. In fact, this is listed as the oldest bowling club in the world—established in 1299. Despite the fact it was closed to the public, I stepped in long enough to shoot a couple of pictures and leave before being thrown out. Frankly it looked about as boring as cricket but the field was beautifully manicured and everything was very distinguished—uniforms, etc.
I also visited the Museum of Archaeology and God’s House Tower—the Medieval tower that guarded the old port of Southampton. I promised myself I wouldn’t get caught up in the “oldness” of everything over here but the reminders are everywhere—buildings here were constructed centuries before the Pilgrims landed (after all, they sailed from here.)
There is about a mile of the old Midieval wall still standing here and I walked along it today—I did a lot of walking (whicfh I needed after that flight over here).
Tomorrow I start earning my pay but I’m off to a good start so far……

The Nicaragua Experience Was Fantastic.....

I went in with a group I had never met until we joined up at the Houston airport, went to a county I wasn’t familiar with, and worked on a project I’d been warned would be “primitive” at best. Eight of us met up at the airport and flew down together—a mixed group of five women and three men including three teenagers.
We arrived in Nicaragua after dark on Sunday night and were met and driven to the CEPAD headquarters in Managua. We spent Monday and part of Tuesday in orientations then drove about an hour to the town of Jinotepe near Lake Nicaragua.
CEPAD is a Spanish acronym for Protestant Council of Churches in Nicaragua and does not provide aid but, instead, provides services that prepare and teach the Nicaraguans in the countryside to help themselves. After generations of brutal dictatorship, a ten-year civil war that cost nearly 100,000 lives—mostly civilian—and a recent administration of graft and corruption the Nicaraguan society has been turned upside down. A confusing mixture of agrarian reform coupled with massive unemployment in the cities has resulted in a generation of Nicaraguans being forced into the countryside with absolutely no idea how to use the land to even feed their own families much less establish an agricultural economy. That’s why CEPAD focuses on assisting rather than donating goods.
In the case of our group, our goal was to refurbish a school in the SE area of Nicaragua in a town called Jinotepe. When the Sandinistas overthrew the government in 1978 they established free education for all children but, unfortunately there was never enough money to follow through and today there is rudimentary education through six years. We were working on an abandoned church school so CEPAD could offer education after the sixth year which is basically “adult education.”
We lived in the school itself while we were working on it. There was electricity most of the time but not all. The school had three small bathrooms with commodes but no running water so the commodes had to be flushed by the “pouring out of the bucket” method and showers consisted of a barrel of water, a bucket and a dipper with which to “dip and pour” cold water in a drain area. We slept on concrete floors with thin mattresses the first two nights.
This was an excellent group for me to break in with—they included me immediately—and I took to their work effort right away. When we worked it was very intensive and we tended to go until dark each day. We started by stripping and painting the interior walls of the open-air rooms, sanding and refinishing donated student desks, and ended by painting the exterior of the building.
One room in particular left an impression with me: It was in shambles when we started and we refinished it in time for three of the adults to use it for their graduation dissertations before parents and school administrators and we were invited to sit in. I am attaching “before, during, and after” photographs to the left. The student presentations were very well prepared—these three students will probably go on to a university in Managua next year. What struck me in the midst of all this poverty was that their parents dressed in their finest clothing and brought their children. When the candidates made their presentations to the school administrators their parents stood on the stage beside them and you could see the pride. CEPAD had provided the school with a computer and projector so you had the odd situation of seeing a PowerPoint presentation in a school that often had no electricity. For our group this was instant gratification because three days earlier the room had been in shambles and was now being used as a real school. Incidentally, when we left, the students used this same room to give us a farewell ceremony with music and folk dancing.
That day it rained so hard and so long that our mattresses were soaked as well as our bedding. Then the temperature dropped unseasonably cold so we went into town and found a hostel operated by some missionaries for $10/night and spent the final two nights there and traveled back and forth to the school.
On the trip there we stopped at a farmer’s market and bought food and we had a woman who cooked for us at the school. She used a two-burner stove in not the best of sanitary conditions but turned out some of the best food and only a couple of the group suffered minor health problems—we definitely ate “local.”
On Friday we finished around noon and drove out into the countryside to visit three farms CEPAD has been working with. The first farmer was a former Contra soldier who had moved to the area with his wife and three children a couple of years earlier and was trying to feed his family on about ¾ of an acre. CEPAD has provided him with barbed wire to keep animals out of his crops and advised him on how to set up drainage and erosion barriers and has given him a “starter kit” of banana trees and other crops. The family lives in a one-room cinderblock house with no electricity, running water, or even glass in the windows but this guy was already feeding his family and even selling some crops at the local market. CEPAD advisors had taught him grafting, composting, fertilizing and basically turned him into a successful farmer in a couple of years. In return, he has to provide “starter kits” to five others as well as advise them. In that way he pays back what he received.
The second farm we visited was a similar story only the man had used the plants to develop a moderately successful nursery and was selling plants at the local market and for landscaping projects.
The third project was unique in that it involved a “women’s commune” (there are a lot of “war widows” here). Here the “starter kits” were piglets and chickens and the women were taught how to raise, breed and sell the animals while expanding their own livestock. In some of the most impoverished conditions I’ve seen outside of Africa, these really poor women were just absolutely proud of what they’d accomplished. In return they had to provide starter animals and information to five other communes……The program isn’t solving the problem of poverty in Nicaragua but these families aren’t starving and even showing some improvement in all aspects of their lives. The children were especially touching and like kids everywhere, they loved to have their pictures taken and then look at them on our digital cameras.
We finished the school on Saturday and the students gave us our farewell ceremony. They prayed, sang, gave speeches and then gave us each a tee-shirt as thanks. The best part was when two little girls in native dresses came in and danced traditional dances to Nicaraguanmusic. Double-click the picture and check her out......
We returned to Managua Saturday night and stayed at the CEPAD headquarters but did slip out and find a pizza parlor. Sunday was our “tourist” day but rained all day as well and we were frankly so tired physically we all looked like zombies. We drove up on one of the mountains overlooking Managua that was an old prison and is now a public park with a great view of the city. We also visited the ancient cathedral that was destroyed by the 1972 earthquake as well as the new cathedral that is butt-ugly. The old church was Spanish architecture but so badly damaged by the earthquake it had to be abandoned. The new cathedral was mostly financed by the owner of Pizza Hut who is a member of the Opus Dei sect of the Catholic Church that received so much negative and controversial publicity in The da Vinci Code. It was free, but even the locals dislike the design--they refer to it as "Our Lady of Lactation." It was raining too hard and too foggy to visit the volcano so we took a boat ride on Lake Nicaragua and ended the day eating at an El Salvadorian café in town.
Early Monday morning we caught our flight back to Houston. I intend to do a lot more of these trips and this group seems to stick together and do a couple a year.