Sweat of Your Brow Winter 1996

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Today work begins at midnight. You see, in order for me to catch the boat at 7:30 a.m., I have to bus six hours until the road ends. There is no road access to work today.

Down at the dock, people push and scramble for a seat on the boat. A boat meant for twelve people somehow crams twenty, and people curse under their breath and cast dirty glances at the boat driver who is encouraging more to get on. "Hey man! Why do you complain?" the boat man yells. "This is the third world. You're in Nicaragua!"

Even with twenty people, we take off with great speed. The boat on the Rio Escondido winds through mangrove forests and swamps, while fish flip out of the water and back under in the blink of an eye and pelicans make spear dives to snag their breakfast for the morning.

The boat reaches Bluefields, principal village on the southern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. My partner and I get off the boat to find a mishmash of ethnicity-Black
Creoles, Miskito Indians, and Mestizos abound. English, Spanish, and the Miskito dialect are all spoken interchangeably. Exhausted by the lack of sleep and the swirl of activity around us, we find a small motel by the water and collapse for the afternoon.

As a Mennonite Central Committee (mcc) worker in Nicaragua, I often need to make trips like this one. Today I'm setting up the itinerary for a U.S. tour group interested in studying Nicaragua's impoverished Atlantic Coast. Boats, broken English, and the baking
sun will form the panorama over the next few days.

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