My wife Ela and I recently spent a very special year together and this is part of that story. It was the year of our 50th birthdays (we are the same age). It seemed we had been busy raising children and putting them through college for so many years, and our focus for quite some time was on trying to earn enough to accomplish this, as well as dealing with the many realities of our complex daily lives. It was probably, in many ways a typical middle class life, and we were both anxious for a big adventure to shake it up.

So, for one year, we rented our house, complete with all the furnishings as well as our cat, the chickens and goats! Our daughter got the car for the year and the care of our sailboat we left to good friends. Our year began with a month of sailing our small (20-foot) sailboat in the San Juan Islands, in northwest Washington and the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. It was a good time to get close and in rhythm with each other. Finally we were having time together without the big gaps of jobs, commutes and a myriad of other routines and obligations.

Then we started south. Our southern-most goal was the Island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua. You see, Bainbridge Island , our home in the North, has a very special relationship with Ometepe. We are "Sister Islands"! Ela and I have both been to Ometepe a number of times in the past, but always with good-will and cultural-exchange delegations from Bainbridge, with much on the agenda to accomplish and always in a very short time. Because of this special relationship, we have made many good friends on Ometepe. But, because of the time limitations, we always felt that we were never quite able to get into, and operate in, the same rhythm as the people there. This time, however, Ela and I really wanted to have enough time to experience normal life on Ometepe, hopefully on more of their terms and at their daily pace. For the five months we planned on being there, we chose the village of Balgüe to live in. In Balgüe, we chose a barrio that has no electricity.

On Ometepe, we are very close to one family in particular: that of Carlos and Maria Elena Martinez. Over a number of years we have stayed in their home in the town of Altagracia and watched the family grow and the children growing up! We also knew another family fairly well: that of Bernabé and Inez Lopez in Balgüe. We would get to know them much better in the next several months as kind neighbors and able leaders in our chosen community. Scott Renfro, who is an American from the Northwest and also a friend, now lives on Ometepe. He is associated with our sister islands program, especially our potable water projects. He offered to help us with the logistics of setting up housekeeping on Ometepe and was an invaluable resource in many, many ways.

The following is our journal of the special time we were so fortunate to experience on our sister island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua. I wrote the journal entries and Ela illustrated them with paintings, sketches and photographs.

Jan 2, 1996
This is the first day of a new phase of our special year. This morning we said good-bye to the Environmental Delegation from Bainbridge. They arrived on December 22, and after 10 days together they are going off in several different directions while Ela and I remain here in the barrio of "Honduras" in the pueblo of Balgüe.

While here, Dale, Regina and Lee, who are avid Audubon "birders", spent a lot of their time identifying the hundreds of tropical bird species that live on this narrow isthmus connecting the two Americas. Some of them even migrate between our two sister islands!

Keith and Jane will fly to Costa Rica in the morning to spend another two weeks of travel. They are naturalists and explorers but the majority of their experiences have been in the remote areas of our own Pacific Northwest.

David and Gary will spend another week in Nicaragua working on tests for the installation of a "packet radio/computer" connection between Bainbridge and Ometepe. David has been working hard for some time to develop an e-mail connection between our two sister islands.

Having all these special friends here all at once was a little like one long party, with the associated feature of not enough time with any one of them individually, and far too much time spent waiting around for one or another before the group could take a step. Scott Renfro observed that this was a singularly "uncollective" group. I suspect that the objectives of each of these individuals were met more with this lack of structure, since each had his/her own agenda. There was a definite leadership vacuum. For me, this was quite frustrating, at times.

After we waved good bye and watched our friends leave on the wooden banana boat for San Jorge, I turned to Ela and gave her a big hug. We both turned around, looked up at the main street of Moyogalpa with the perfect cone of Volcán Concepción rising above it and felt a great calm settling over us.

We visited briefly with Melania, the owner of the "Hotelito Ali" and a community leader, to discuss our Sister Island Association's plans to move out to new communities with our upcoming high school delegation in order to broaden our relationship. She thought it a good idea too, so I think it's a definite "go". We finally boarded Don Albaro's bus to visit the Martinez family in Altagracia.

Although we have chosen to live out in Balgüe, the Martinez family has set us up a room in their house that is exclusively for our use whenever we are in Altagracia. Maria Elena had made a new bedspread and they had put a little table and student chair in the room for furniture. When we are at their house, a light bulb is re-strung into our room, though normally it is used in the other part of the house.

The Martinez family wants to help us get settled into our new house, just to make sure everything is O.K. We were planning a family trip to Balgue with them, but the 2:00 PM bus left at 1:30 due to "poor road conditions" since there was a terrific rainstorm last night. So, we came alone (without the Martinez clan) on the 4:30. It took one hour to travel the twelve miles from Altagracia to Balgüe, which we reached about 5:30, just before dark. Our new neighbors, Bernabé and Inez, invited us to dinner.

After dinner we came home, quite exhausted, to the little brick building with the zinc roof that will be a community center after we depart. All hundred or so kids in the neighborhood have been chasing one another around the outside of our house ever since! We have one electric light bulb inside -- the only one in the barrio. This light was courtesy of a very long string of wire bootlegged (for our New Year's Eve "House-warming") from the local Health Clinic, about 500 yards away, through plantain fields and over several neighbors' roofs!

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