The Friends Project

http://30dor.com/kris/TFP-Nicaragua.pdf — Click here to see the official newsletter and photos.

Nicholas, a coffee farmer in Ocotal, is launching an eco-tourism business with other farmers to help provide for their families and offer backpackers an intimate look at rural Nica life.

El Sauce, NicaraguaTomorrow I leave snowy Rochester, N.Y. for Central America. I am going to write and photograph a story about SUNY Geneseo’s service -learning program in the small town. Students develop their own sustainable development projects and implement them alongside villagers and an alumnus. I will be helping to teach English, visiting remote health outposts with nurses, working with new travel guides, laying brick, carrying cement bags and mangling Spanish as I try to communicate well with a host family.I have also collected donations from an ever growing circle of friends, who know about the project now and want to help out. Stay posted! The adventure begins. 

Thanks to our two latest donors to future Friends Project projects:Dawn Robinson in Springwater, NY and Harvey and Martha Rhody of Fairport, NY. Both attended the “Amazon: A Fragile Balance” exhibit and decided to contribute to future improvement projects. Our grand total is now about $700.It doesn’t sound like so much, but we did amazing things with less than $500 in Peru. I’m examining a few projects in the Iquitos area and Nueva Esperanza so we can use this money; and show more p eople what we can do together and hopefully raise even more money for the next project. 

 “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.

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