I am returning back to Jinotega later today and hope to find the time and resources to make more posts during this week.  There have been some technical difficulties with the website which have now been fixed – the site was down on part of Saturday and Sunday.

Hopefully I will be able to make another post later tonight, but in the mean time here is the Wikipedia article on Jinotega.

Tommorow we go back to Jinotega after visiting family and freinds during the holiday.  Nicaragua essentially shuts down at about noon on Wednesday of holy week, or “Semana Santa.”  Buses will start again tommorow and we will see how our solar lamps are doing.

We arrived in Jinotega yesterday during the day.  The first thing I noticed was that there was just a lot more dryness and dust everywhere than I had seen in my past visits.  Right now Nicaragua is in the dry season and it makes a big difference – this is not the Jinotega I remember – the land has a golden hue and dust swirls in the air.  My freind’s skin has become darker under the cloudless sky, as though they changed race while I was gone.

From my time in southern Nicaragua, my legs are completely covered with bug bites of some kind which ich really bad and have basically turned into tiny open wounds.  That might have been from swimming in the laguna de Apoya.  I will try to link back to that location in this post in the future because I still recommend it despite the bites.  And now – my arms and neck are completely red from the hot Jinotegan sun – something I have not seen in the past – usually when I have been up here it rains constantly and mist swirls throughout the countryside!

Tonight and tommorow we will be putting together quite a few lamps to see how they work and determine whether we need to pick anything else up from Managua.  I will be adding more pictures to the posts below now, and return with other pictures of Jinotega later.