Fire!

I'm a little delayed on getting this post up, but last Friday turned out to be more "exciting" than anticipated. In Nicaragua, the education system is regulated so that all the primary and secondary school students are learning the same thing. In order to keep teachers up to date, they take the last Friday of the month to get together (by the grade they teach) in the morning or afternoon to review what needs to be taught for the next month. It's a painful process to see, because there are only a handful of manuals for every 20 or so teachers, so the meeting is largely composed of copying what is in the manual into a notebook. Photocopying or getting more manuals doesn't seem to be an option.

Anywho, I tell you that simply to explain that we observed this meeting and then had the afternoon free to do whatever. I was a little tired after the first week of work and getting adjusted to the schools, so I decided to lay down and take a nap. I slept for about half an hour before the humidity woke me up. I was dozing back of when I heard a loud boom. That didn't seem out of the normal by any means, because where our house is located, there's a decent amount of traffic coming into and going out of the main part of the city, so trucks are often coming by and making a racket. Then about five seconds later, my fan shut off, so I knew the power was out. Again, not very alarming since the power has gone out a half dozen times since we've been here. I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep at all without the fan, so I started to get up, and at that point my brain started processing the boom and the power outage as more than coincidence.

So I stepped out onto the porch and saw the black smoke rising up above the trees across the street and thought, Well, that can't be good. So I grab the keys and open up the front gate. I walked out to the left (west) and walked over to the street that runs perpendicular to the street our house is on. About five houses north, there's a house absolutely up in flames. By this time, anyone who heard the boom or saw the smoke rising above the trees is gathering around to watch the spectacle. By the time I ran back inside to get my camera (yeah, I'm kind of a tourist like that), the fire had started to spread to the house next door. Now the neighbors are getting worried about how far it's going to spread. A fire truck finally shows up after about ten or fifteen minutes, but guess what's missing - water! So now we've got to wait another ten minutes for the water trucks to come, because the Good Lord knows there's not fire hydrants here. So, like I said, the neighbors are getting worried about their stuff, so we all start helping this guy clear his stuff out of his house. Unfortunately, some of the kids that were "helping" were actually taking advantage of the situation to do some personal shopping. Thankfully, none of the big stuff was stolen, and we got it down the street (near our house) so it would be out of harm's way.

Now sweating profusely and trickled with ash, I decide to get a closer look at the fire and get some up close and personal footage. In hindsight, it probably wasn't the greatest idea in the world, but it was fun to be so close to the action. First of all, I counted one and about five pairs of firefighter boots among the couple dozens of guys trying to get the fire out. A significant amount of time was spent trying to get the fire truck's hose hooked up with the water truck's valve and get some water pressure. It seemed to be that whoever was willing to help would jump in, so I ended up helping snake the hose over the chain link fence and around some posts. After about ten more minutes, they were finally able to get water pressure and started on spraying everything down, and in about 20 minutes, things were mostly under control.

We helped the neighbor man get his things back into his house, and I talked with him for a little while about life stuff, the kinds of things you get into when you are about to lose all your possessions and are just glad to have your life. He was grateful for the help and content to have what he had. Thankfully the fire didn't spread any further, and hopefully it will be the last time any of us have to see anything like it.