11 July, 2000

This episode begins with me waist deep in the waters of the Tipitapa
outlet, where the waters from one enormous Central American lake flow
into another.  "You know, I can tell that stream is experiencing
supercritical flow just by watching the way it goes around you," the
hydrologic engineer I work with is yelling across the wind.  "Hey,
how's the water, anyway?"  Hydrologist humor.  The water is putrid,
actually, and reeks of the millions of Managuan toilets that flush
directly into it, and I'm not pleased at all to be immersed in it.
These weeks have been extraordinarily busy, and (except for Tipitapa)
the stream profiles we surveyed all over the north of Nicaragua were a
pleasant start to the month.

Much of what the Army Corps does in Nicaragua involves water
resources, which has been fortunate for me.  Our project, the post
hurricane Mitch reconstruction program, will last until December of
2001, and what we're trying to do in infuse some new ideas and some
solid engineering skills into a country desperately short on good
technical skills.  After over two years of approaching "international
development" from the ground level up, I'm suddenly working from the
other end.

Happily, there's been some overlap.  One of our projects is the design
of a new bridge for the town of Condega and its outlying communities.
I'd lived in that area for two complete years, and when hurricane
Mitch washed away our bridge, I was trapped on the far side of
civilization as much as anyone else was.  During the rainy seasons of
both 1998 and 1999, there were long stretches of time in which there
was simply no way to get out of the quiet mountain communities to town
to see a doctor, make a phone call, or buy food supplies or medicine.
So the greatest of the many strokes of irony that grace my new job is
that I can be a part of the project that will most affect the lives of
my old friends in the Nicaraguan countryside, and I was permitted the
hero's job of going back to my old community to announce that they'd
have a new bridge before too long.

Nicaragua, meanwhile, moves from disaster to disaster, and last week
we experienced a series of earthquakes, three of them over 5.0 on the
Richter scale, that shook Managua like water in a glass, and knocked
down a number of homes south of here in the Masaya area.  They were
the first earthquakes I've ever experienced and were not pleasant.
The first one caught me in my second story office building, and the
floor bubbled like a cat creeping under the carpet.  The others were
no more enjoyable to an east coaster who grew up on a sand bar.

The episode ends with a parakeet on my shoulder, a little green and
yellow feller I've named the gender-neutral `Xiloa' who flew all by
himself (herself?) out of somebody's bird cage to my girlfriend
Ericka's house.  She brought it to me as a gift and someone to keep me
company.  Xiloa and I struck a deal:  she'll stay around as long as it
takes for her trimmed wing feathers to grow back out, and then if
she'd like to return to the jungle, she has my blessing.  Or she can
stick around for the diet of bananas and bread-soaked-in-milk that she
seems to enjoy so much, and I can continue the interesting
conversation I've been having with the chatty little thing.

All well under the mango tree.