Some Things About Me

On December 15, 2017 for the third time I travelled to Nicaragua to promote a clean water project. Once again, I was joined by my friends from Boulder Valley Rotary, John and Maud Kenyon. John is at the beginning stages of writing a Rotary Global Grant for the small village of El Siuce, located on a rutted, steep, dirt road outside the mountainous northern city of Jalapa, fast against the Honduran border. We previously have been involved with successfully rebuilding gravity-fed potable water systems in the near-by communities of Pasmata and El Trapiche. Again, we are partnering with Boulder Friendship City Projects (FCP) and their local representatives Karla Pozo and Greg Bowles. I arrived the evening of the Friday the 15 th at the Managua airport and was met there by Greg, a U.S. citizen married to a Nicaraguan. They live about an hour south of the capital city near the small town of Diriomo. He invited me to spend the first night at his place. There we t...

On Thursday, December 1, 2016 I took off from Boulder with two friends from Rotary Club of Boulder Valley, John and Maud Kenyon, for a 10 day trip to Nicaragua. This was our second time there and the principle reason for the travel was to help the village of El Trapiche, near Jalapa in the north of the country, celebrated the completion of the rebuilding of their water system. Our Rotary Club had provided funding and successfully applied for a Rotary International Global Grant to partially cover the costs of the project. After that we planned to see other parts of the country that we had missed on our previous trip. John, our photographer, would chronical our adventure. We had originally visited the area in the spring of 2014 to participate in an inauguration ceremony to commemorate the finish of another water project in the small, nearby pueblo of Pasmata. As was done later in El Trapiche, BV Rotary had partnered with Boulder Friendship City Projects (FCP) and the area residen...

APR 16 2014 March 24 to April 1, 2014 Five friends from the Rotary Club of Boulder Valley, Maud and John Kenyon, Bart Swanson, Travis Ramos, and me, had a busy and fulfilling week in Nicaragua. We went there for both the adventure and to check into clean water projects that Travis’ company, Second Mile Water, was organizing in the small pueblos around the city of Jalapa. Jalapa is an agricultural center (tobacco and coffee) in the mountainous highlands of northern Nicaragua, just south of the Honduran border. Many internal immigrants are attracted to the area for the field labor jobs on offer. They have established ever expanding settlements of block-built homes on free or very inexpensive land along the paved roads of the valley. These homesteads often lack basic services such as access to potable water. Until a well-designed system (costing $35,000 to $60,000 for smaller villages of 500 or so inhabitants) is in place, they either access contaminated water from local stream...