Moments from Decemberish

If you want to catch a few end of the year Pekrul moments, have a look at this album.

Roads as Freedom

I had a conversation with Doña Melba and Doña Selfida a couple of weeks ago which gave me a new appreciation for the importance of road building in rural communities.   Melba and Selfida are both elderly women from El Ojochal del Listón.  Melba had come to visit Selfida for the morning and they were lamenting about the difficulties of getting older: how they had lost their confidence in riding horses, which made it difficult to get down to town, and how their legs ached when hiking up the mountain and so they didn’t like leaving their homes much anymore.

Rural road improvements won’t address the hardships of aging, but Melba and Selfida’s conversation reminded me of talks I’ve had with my own grandparents about the difficulties of getting around and how they sometimes felt isolated or penned in or worried about what would happen if they were hurt and no one was around.  Among the rural poor Nicaragua, without a decent road to their home, even the young and healthy can feel this way.  Remembering the people I’ve known from home who have felt this way, like my grandparents or immigrant families I worked with who couldn’t afford a car to get to work, it made me appreciate more how freeing it must feel to finally have a decent road.