Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

I’ve returned from my first two official visits to “El Campo” and let me say that, putting altruism and health outcomes aside, it was fun! While my Spanish still needs some improvement before I can properly communicate with these fast-talking people who don’t pronounce the letter “s”, I had fun accompanying and at times helping Leonel in two communities: Papaturro, where we have a pilot test going to bring filters, education, and medicines to the population, and Ojochal. I think the best way to describe the actual visits themselves (we took water samples from wells, filters, and the receiving buckets that hold the “clean” water, and also administered questionnaires) is by comparison. For some strange reason, the neurons in my brain linked the conglomeration of sounds inside one of the houses (roosters, dogs, children crying, sometimes a radio playing, pigs, dogs, etc.) to the beginning of the song Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I think it’s because the guitar riff sounds like a rooster cock-a-doodle-doing to me, but whatever the reason, conversing with these families had a similar scattered, busy, feeling that I think the song has, mainly because there is simply a lot of background noise.

I don’t think I’ve introduced Leonel into our cast of characters yet. He is one of the members of our “Equipo de Filtros” (that is, Filter Team), and is the point person for educational efforts to help people living in these rural communities to understand proper hygiene and at times how to use and maintenance their filter. Despite having a shaved head on which is usually a Bo-Sox hat, I picture him as a long haired hippy. I have not known him for long, but he has an infectiously warm spirit and enjoys the pure adventure of going to “El Campo” to essentially chat. He shifts artfully between comforting silliness and serious suggestion-making and I feel truly lucky to be working with him, since it seems we will be making more trips together like the ones this weekend.

More about the visits: the first one, on Friday to Papaturro, was to deliver the results of lab tests of people’s water to their homes, to explain to them what the results mean, and to leave them with specific suggestions for how they can continue to improve the quality, and thereby the healthiness, of their water. We visited seven households and despite the clear scarcity of resources, I left with more than I came with because families kept insisted on giving me bags of fruits—jocote and tamarindo, two local fruits which are quite good—and coffee and I don’t really have the language tools to politely refuse offers like that yet. The land itself is beautiful and from many points in Papaturro you can see Concepcion and Maderas, the two volcanoes in Lake Nicaragua, which rise nearly a mile into the sky. There are countless trails connecting the families’ properties which are bounded by fencing to contain cattle, livestock, and other animals. In one of the pictures, you can see Leonel and Antonia (the main “brigadista” or health worker in Papaturro) walking through a field on our way to another home. However, I still don’t understand what takes up people’s time or how they make a living and I imagine that boredom is one of the most prevalent emotions felt here. Many of the animals were noticeably skinny with protruding ribcages. While our pilot project in Papaturro is essentially finished, it seems there is much much more that can be done to help this community to reach an acceptable level of clean water across the board.

Ojochal was similarly resource poor but it seemed that many of the families were very enthusiastic about finding ways to improve the quality of their water. I found this somewhat surprising: taking into account all the possibly issues that a poor family living in Ojochal could have, water quality floats to the top (pun intended)? The fact that the answer to this question tends to be in the affirmative is good, obviously, but still surprising.