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The school is open!

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

It’s open! On Saturday the community celebrated the new school, giving thanks to everyone who worked hand in hand. Today I was fortunate enough to attend the first day of classes in the new school. Enjoy…

The school is nearly done!

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Someone recently saw a photo of masons working on the school The Friends Project helped raise funds for in Las Minitas, Nicaragua. They said, “Wow, you’re really moving. You’re no joke.”

That’s right, The Friends Project doesn’t mess around!

We started fundraising in late August with other volunteers, including an elementary school principal and SUNY Geneseo students, and started the first foundation hole digging Dec. 1.

Masons just laid the tile floor this week.

By Feb. 10, we will have a community celebration and the kids in Las Minitas will be the first ever of their community to go to their own dedicated school, ensuring they have all the opportunity to complete an elementary education.

A second look

Saturday, January 14th, 2012

I always encourage my beginning photojournalism students to never delete or otherwise throw away their images because often the images you are positive are amazing images when you take them don’t turn out to be so. And sometimes,  the photos you dismiss on first glance are the ones you like or speak the loudest.

This gentleman came up on me fast while I was walking in El Sauce, and I took two photos before he had passed. It was quick, and I dismissed the image. Many times. In the end, it is one of my most popular photographs.

On my second, fourth or seventh look, I noticed how it conveys the pace, the environment and occupations in a very specific, exotic place. The teenage girls giggling and being teens in the doorway could be anywhere — they are like every teenage girl, everywhere.

Now, I love this photo.

Second looks. Always worth it, in photos and life.

Daily commute, El Sauce, Nicaragua. Photo by Kris Dreessen

My host family

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

The best part of Ocotal is being able to live with a family and experience traditional Nicaraguan life on a subsistence/coffee farm, where life has not changed much in 80 or so years. When you want meat, you go catch a chicken. They grow most of what they eat, and grow, dry, roast, grind and make their own coffee. Living off the land is literal here.
Every night, we sat around their table and played a game or talked by light of my head lamp.

The view from on high

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

Sunset at the Ranchon on the mountain top in El Sauce, Nicaragua, where the Los Altos de Ocotal eco-tourism cooperative members welcome visitors to their farms and way of life, which is a step back into “old world” ways… cooking over fires, mashing corn and hand-patting tortillas at meals, oil lamp and growing and harvesting simple crops with a mind to eco-friendly practices.

You can see San Cristobal, the volcano, here too. So beautiful.

A long walk

Monday, December 26th, 2011

I’m standing on the Mirador (lookout) in Las Minitas, on top of the mountain.

Down there, where I’m pointing, is the school in El Jicote that the kids in Las Minitas had to walk to every day — at least an hour each way — to attend elementary school. Their parents lobbied the Nicaraguan government for four years to obtain a permanent teacher.

For a year, they studied with the teacher under a tree at a neighbor’s porch, until the residents built a makeshift shelter for a school with salvaged wood.

There will be a big celebration Feb. 10 or 11 to open the first school ever in Las Minitas!

What’s El Sauce like?

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

check out my slideshow …

http://www.geneseo.edu/geneseo_scene/el-sauce

El Sauce- pig procession

Back to the land of lakes and volcanoes.

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

I always tell reporters: Show, don’t tell. I could say that Manuel, the young man we provided a small grant to purchase a bicycle taxi so he could rent it out and go to school full time is now teaching English and earned a scholarship to one of the best institutes, and I could say that since completion of the artisan training that we helped fund, the Cerro Colorado basket-makers have sold orders to half a dozen U.S. businesses…

but it’s gonna be so much cooler to provide some photos and video.

August. Nicaragua. El Sauce. Can’t wait.

Amazon gallery show up

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Amazon show “Amazon: A Fragile Balance” is on exhibition at Ock Hee’s Gallery in upstate New York, in Honeoye Falls.The show includes images from my time living with colonists in the Brazilian Amazon who had a plague of mosquitoes on their land and were protesting for help in a roadside, makeshift camp (1991) and my time helping researchers in Peru, trekking in the forest, catching caimans to see what they had for lunch and launching health care and wildlife management programs in remote communities.Images explore the culture, the beauty of the forest and the wild of one of the few places left where nature, not man, is in control. It compels us to explore man’s struggle to co-exist with nature and what impact we have on the environment, and what can be lost.Several images feature communities that are recipients of the work The Friends Project does, including the Amazon Animal Orphanage (care for a baby howler monkey), Nueva Esperanza (window screens, a latrine, safe drinking-water program, shoes for kids) and Belén (school supplies).I’ll post some photos later of the images.

Good news from Nueva Esperanza

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

One of the researchers with the Earthwatch Institute Amazon project sent me an update on how The Friends Project donation of $300 for health-care and wildlife management initiatives has been used in the very remote village of Nueva Esperanza. There are 190 people here and no services.

*installing screens on windows of homes to help prevent malaria.

*buying plastic sandals for children ages 3 to 12 to protect their feet.

*building a metal screen around the latrine at the small school, for sanitation.

There’s still $40 left. Tula says they will use it to buy plastic buckets and chlorine, to teach villagers a safe and simple way to sanitize river water that they use to drink and cook.

Malaria’s a huge problem here, because villagers rely on the forest and river for water and food.

Photos of the work coming.

Here is a link to an article about spending time in Nueva Esperanza and with a family on the Yavari River that I wrote for my newpsaper:
http://www.mpnnow.com/news/view_story.php?articleId=2408&zoom_highlight=amazon

Village visit