Nuevas Esperanzas<\/a>, up the main well-paved road, onto a dirt road, then onto a road that I\u2019d barely consider a road with our 4 wheel drive.\u00a0 Then we reached a rural farm where we parked the car I was driving.\u00a0 We piled into the Land Cruiser truck, 3 in the front, and 3 adults\/3 kids in the back to drive up a barely passable rocky ravine, that is actually called a road to take us further up the side of the volcano Telica.\u00a0 Nuevas Esperanzas has worked with a small primitive rural village up on the volcano to help them build rainwater collection tanks, because they don\u2019t have access to drinking water on top of the volcano.\u00a0 These people normally travel 2 hours down the rocky \u201croad\u201d on horseback to fill 2-30gallon jugs and bring them back for their water use, or the women trek down the mountain to do their laundry in the springs.\u00a0 Amazing.
\nWe bumped and bounced up the \u201croad\u201d that Nuevas Esperanzas is helping them \u201cpave\u201d, which means hand-mixing cement (after hauling up huge bags of cement and sand on horseback) to put between the big rocks of the road.\u00a0 It\u2019s already made a huge difference for these people in being able to get the beans and avocados they grow down to the main road to be taken somewhere to sell.\u00a0 They used to joked that they grew avocados, but by the time they reached the bottom they were guacamole!\u00a0\u00a0 They’ve done several sections of road already, but they are hoping to find the funding to do several more in the future.<\/p>\nWhen got as far as we could go (though Andrew said he could drive the rest of the way, but we\u2019d never make it in the back!), we piled out of the truck and hiked 1.5 miles up the volcano to see the village and have lunch in the school.\u00a0 It was quite a huge undertaking with the kids, but they did really well.\u00a0 The people are so wonderful, and it\u2019s amazing to see the tank and to know what a difference it\u2019s made.\u00a0 Nuevas Esperanzas is hoping to find the funding to do many more smaller tanks at various houses, letting the locals do the construction themselves now that they\u2019ve completed the large one at the school themselves.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing what we take for granted when we turn on the faucet to rinse an apple or brush our teeth.<\/p>\n
Ok, enough chatter.\u00a0 The kiddos are getting restless with their movie, so I’d better sign off.\u00a0 Please keep us in your prayers, especially for grace and patience with each other and the kids as we try to dive in and experience this beautiful place.\u00a0 Thank you so much for sharing in our journey back here!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019re doing well here in Nicaragua.\u00a0 It\u2019s quite an adventure experiencing this place that\u2019s so dear to my heart with the little ones.\u00a0 Actually, it\u2019s hard and very different.\u00a0 But it is so wonderful to be here, and we\u2019ve had some great experiences so far, and I know there are many more to come this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkzLf-eI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=912"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":913,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions\/913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}