Delays

At 7:45 a.m. on Jan. 13, Craig Cowan of San Luis Obispo and his team drove an hour to the Nicaraguan capital of Managua for a fourth time to finally get the shoes. When they arrived, they found that the paperwork that was supposed to be finished wasn’t.

While the manager was filling it out, her computer crashed. They fixed the machine, but then the printer stopped working — so they had to fix that, too.

Around noon, a warehouse employee had to go to the bank to deposit the customs fees into a government account.

When he returned, he received a call from the teller: come back — we gave you the wrong change. He turned around, but got stuck in traffic.

When he finally finished the banking errand, his manager called a trucking company to take the shoes to Granada — but of course, the truck got stuck in traffic. And when it finally arrived, it was too small.

So they had to call another truck and load the shoes.

Finally the shipment left for Granada at 4:30 p.m. During rush hour.

It was like this every day.

Hostel

I found a hostel in Granada for $10 a night in order to stay on budget.

The portly innkeeper listened patiently to my crippled Spanish as I explained my need for a room, and he chuckled frequently. His daughter and son sat nearby stroking one of several tiny newborn kittens.

He showed me to a modest space about 8 feet long and just wider than a single bed, and I smelled a funny odor in the bathroom that I couldn’t quite place. The innkeeper left me to unpack.

The stench wasn’t coming out of the sink — sniff, sniff — nor did it emanate from the trash can, toilet or shower. But it grew worse at night, lingering in the stifling Central American heat.

Circulating air from the ceiling fan blew the scent out of the bathroom and into my face. I turned the bed around so my head was 6 feet further from the source.

Experimenting the next evening, I dug a plastic bag out of my backpack, placed it over the shower drain and weighted it down with a shoe.

The smell disappeared.

Glue

It’s apparent that there are two ways to give aid in this area: spread it thin across many hands, or heap it thick upon a few.

Donna Tabor — a charity director who will help distribute the shoes — has chosen the latter.

She’s been doing aid work in Granada for nine years, and among her organizations is a trade school for reformed gang members and addicts.

"The type of kids I work with are former glue sniffers," she says, "and back nine years ago, that was the big thing."

The narcotic is for repairing shoes, but sniffers experience a euphoria that quells their hunger pangs.

"You know what’s ironic?" she asks. "They sell it in Gerber’s baby food jars."

And it’s these people to whom she wants to avoid giving the fruits of San Luis Obispo County residents’ efforts.

"Lots of kids are addicted, so they’ll lay out in the park selling things so they can keep sniffing," Tabor says. "Or the kids could get drunk, pass out and the gangs could steal their shoes."

Peder

Most of the units in the colonial town are all built into each other, rendering each street a kaleidoscopic façade of blues, browns and yellows.

Each color of paint distinguishes one house from the next, and from the outside, a traveler can’t distinguish the home of a millionaire from that of a family of 26.

But the museum of Peder Kolind — the Dutch entrepreneur and orphanage director — is different. It’s white, and there are multiple opened doors covered in wrought iron steel bars. Behind them: empty white pedestals.

At waist-level he’s installed computer screens throughout, so children can read about each exhibit. In the center of the building lies a courtyard behind which sit several apartments for academics-in-residence.

The Dutchman wants to display $11 million of pre-Colombian pottery in the building, but he doesn’t have control of the collection. The government confiscated all 1,500 pieces when officials arrested him on suspicion of exporting Nicaraguan cultural artifacts.

While he was in jail, more than a thousand children from his orphanage ran through the streets, banging their dishes with their forks.

"No Peder, no food," they shouted, so authorities let him out.

They just kept his pottery. Kolind thinks government officials have sold it off to a collector in America.

Wealth

Wealth isn’t distributed evenly in this country.

A handful of elite Nicaraguans own most everything, while most everyone owns just a handful.

There’s a painting on a wall in Granada of a nude woman with a segmented monster attached to her breast.

The segments, says the owner, represent the families that own so much. The families that are sucking Mother Nicaragua dry.

Trash

The Costa Rican side of Nicaragua’s border is a spotless, thick jungle.

But the trash that blows across Nicaragua’s fields clings to everything that stands in its way.

The wind has affixed tangles of plastic bags to trees, fence posts and even the barbed wire strung between.

Blue, pink, white, black, big, tiny — the bags come in every color and size imaginable.

Drivers throw junk out windows and children smash Styrofoam boxes in the streets; they all leave the mess for someone else.

Crossing that border is not unlike traveling from San Diego to Tijuana.

The bird lives

Nine-year-old Alejandra Mendoza, who received a pair of shoes from San Luis Obispo County, just started school this year.

But how for long she’ll attend is unclear.

Sending her to class is expensive, and the family sometimes runs out of food.

Already, her grandmother has pulled one of her young cousins out of school because educating him has become too costly.

Obviously depressed, the boy lurks in the shadows of the family’s shack, staring silently into the forest.

Alejandra’s father ran away before she was born, and her mother returns home every few weeks with money for the family.

Alejandra calls her grandmother "mama."

But there are traces of hope in the house, and they come from a parrot named Pastora.

The bird says a few words in Spanish: hola, adiós, that sort of thing.

It also coughs, presumably because the children are hacking due to the dust in their rooms and wood-smoke in their kitchen.

Mostly, though, in spite of the harsh life, the parrot laughs like children playing games in the garden and picking fruit from the trees. It laughs like it means it.

But sometimes, the laugh morphs into something else entirely: a deep, woeful, lonely sob.