Category Archives: Nicaragua

1 Mar 11

Day 14: Leaving Nicaragua

Adios Nicaragua At 5 am it’s still dark as Ivan dri­ves us to the air­port. Inside the van no one is talk­ing and out­side groups of peo­ple out for a bit of exer­cise walk briskly along the median of the almost-emtpy divided high­way and some­times spill out into the fast lane. In the depar­ture lounge I [...]
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1 Mar 11

Day 13: Nicaraguan Journal

We headed back to Managua today and on the way we stopped at the Filtron Filter Factory which is owned and oper­ated by a Belgian man named Frank Schuringa who came to Nicaragua twenty-five years ago, mar­ried a Nicaraguan woman, had a cou­ple of kids, and  estab­lished a cof­fee busi­ness, a compost-making oper­a­tion and the [...]
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1 Mar 11

Day 12: Nicaraguan Journal

Today we took in a town­ful of pot­ters at San Juan de Oriente, a place where every street is lined with pot­tery shops and every nook and cranny con­tains stu­dios, both large and small. The style of pot­tery here is the most well-known and, in some ways, the most sophis­ti­cated in the coun­try: pots are [...]
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1 Mar 11

Day 11: Nicaraguan Journal

Started Day 11 by dri­ving 4 hours south to the mar­ket town of Masaya, which is a short dis­tance south of Managua, where we started our trip, which meant that even though, for the past 10 days, we have felt like we were in remote coun­try­side, we were never more than a few hours from [...]
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1 Mar 11

Day 10: Nicaraguan Journal

Spent the day at Loma Panda, a remote pot­tery in the moun­tains, near the bor­der with Honduras. This pot­tery is run by five sis­ters (and a niece) whose fam­ily has lived there for 500 years and despite their remote loca­tion, the  pot­tery is well-established and the work done there is some of the most inno­v­a­tive [...]
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1 Mar 11

Days 8 & 9: Nicaraguan Journal

Spent most of days 8 and 9 at Santa Rosa, one of the few remain­ing col­lec­tives in Nicaragua. The land belong­ing to the col­lec­tive was orig­i­nally a privately-owned hacienda. When the own­ers fled dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion, the peo­ple who had been work­ing for them moved onto the land and set up the col­lec­tive and then [...]
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1 Mar 11

Day 7: Nicaraguan Journal

This morn­ing we “bor­rowed” the kitchen of the comi­dor where we have been eat­ing and four of our bravest brigadis­tas cooked break­fast for us using a tra­di­tional Nicaraguan wood stove: a long, nar­row fire­box that is fed with long branches at the end of which are a cou­ple of holes to put pots onto the [...]
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1 Mar 11

Day 6: Nicaraguan Journal

First stop was Condega’s, Pre-columbian Museum which has a good col­lec­tion of pot­tery includ­ing clas­si­cally shaped and elab­o­rately painted bowls. There was much spec­u­la­tion as to where the pre-columbians got their colours, as we’re pretty sure it wasn’t from a pot­tery sup­ply house. After that we drove up the hill to look at one of Somoza’s [...]
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1 Mar 11

Day 5: Nicaraguan Journal

Spent the day at Ducuale Grande (an hour out­side Esteli), par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Potters for Peace equiv­a­lent of a ceramic paint­ing party where you pay to paint designs on pre­fab­ri­cated ceramic pieces and then take them home. In this case, our fear­less leader had arranged to buy an assort­ment of hand­made pieces from the pot­ters [...]
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12 Feb 11

Days 3 & 4: Nicaraguan Journal

Started day 3 at Los Hervides de San Jacinto, bub­bling lava pits near the town of San Jacinto, where a small band of chil­dren acted as our “guides” while we wan­dered between steam jets and small pools of lava. After that we had a 20-minute drive to La Sabaneta, where Maritza, one of our brigadis­tas, [...]
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