blue Energy on the Caribbean
Yesterday I made it out to Kahkabila, a Miskito indigenous village with a population of 400, on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua.
Originally published on 20 August 2009 on the Project Nuevo Mundo blog, written from Kahkabila, a Miskito village on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. Reproduced verbatim from web archives, recovered in October 2026.
Yesterday I made it out to Kahkabila, a Miskito indigenous village with a population of 400, on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. To get here, I took a 10pm bus from Managua, the capital, arriving to El Rama at 3 in the morning, and from there taking a speed boat out to Bluefields, arriving finally at 7am. I spent a day in Bluefields checking out the blueEnergy operation there (www.blueenergygroup.org), a wind and solar energy NGO consisting mostly of volunteer engineers from the United States and France. A good percentage of these volunteer engineers are currently suffering from the dengue fever, which is sweeping the Coast right now. Good times. From Bluefields, I took another boat out an hour to the Pearl Lagoon, and from there contracted a fisherman to take me out in a canoe to Kahkabila. It turned out to be quite a treacherous one-hour journey in a small canoe with a black plastic sail, accompanied by heavy winds and spots of downpours, soaking us to the bone. It was a constant battle to scoop water out of the boat with a half of a plastic water bottle, which served as the pail. Ghetto rigging indeed. At times I felt myself out of a scene of Old Man and the Sea. My guide reassured me that ´all is good, all is good´, in that Caribbean-twanged dialect of English they call Creole.
Arriving in Kahkabila at last, we were greeted with an outburst of heavy rainfall, so we hid under the awning of one of the houses and waited it out. The owner of the house wasn´t actually home at the moment; when he eventually came, I heared my guide Ariel say something in Miskito with the words ¨white man¨ stuck in the middle of the phrase. Everyone was very respectful towards me, and even praised the work of the American (!) and European governments while criticizing the Nicaraguan authorities for doing nothing to help them (actually, the only foreign aid project I have seen out here is a Japanese road-building program).
The Caribbean population of Nicaragua lives in harsh conditions on the stormy Coast, on land inaccessible by road. This makes anything imported from the outside prohibitively expensive. In addition, the only cash income these people earn is generally from the fish they catch and fruits and vegetables from small farms (although every once in awhile, a sack of cocaine floats into the Coast, ditched by Colombian smugglers fleeing the Coast Guard, and the lucky recipients of these treasures are plainly visible from their Japanese motorboats and sparkling concrete mansions, significantly contrasting to the leaking wood canoes and wood and corrugated metal huts common in these parts). The electric grid came to Kahkabila at the beginning of this year, and before that blueEnergy had been working two or three years in the community. The first action of blueEnergy here was to erect a windmill, and they have since had to constantly come and repair it (in fact, neither of the two windmills on site were working at the time I visited). The energy from the windmill originally served to charge cell-phones and other battery-powered devices, and still has its purpose as a backup source of energy when the conventional grid isn´t functioning (which is at least a bi-weekly occurence). An energy commission, consisting of townspeople, was created and capacitated by blueEnergy to maintain basic upkeep on the windmill and charge a small fee for people who use the facilities to charge their devices. Since the electric grid came a few months ago, they have lost this revenue stream that was used to maintain the windmills. However, they were devising a new way to raise money: by distributing the energy-efficient products that blueEnergy was promoting (the Nova DLight solar-powered flash light, and CFL lightbulbs, which are preferable to LED´s at this point because of the light quality). The two windmills in the village are still used to power the village´s school and health clinic, and are augmented by recently installed solar panel systems. One or the other is almost always generating energy.
The community was kind and receptive, and even called a meeting of the Energy Commission so I could ask them questions. They asked me to stay the night but my boatmen wanted to get home in time for a dinner of fried fish (broke my six-month fast from eating animal carcasses! There isn´t much to eat other than seafood and coconuts around here). I was somewhat dejected (although certainly not surprised) to find that the first appliance after light bulbs in the village was television, which is spreading like malaria through the village and gluing little children to screens for hours, as gun battles and helicopter explosions fill the eyes and minds of two-year old chidren and make them cry. The general concensus among the inhabitants of the village was that television was a good thing, signifying progress.
We made the journey back paddling against rather strong headwinds, again getting slammed all over (and all over again) by large and fast-moving raindrops. My guide was very happy to get back home safely, and we enjoyed our meal with a nice warm coconut soup called ´Rondon´, eaten with breadfruit. I dropped to sleep on the wooden floor shortly afterwards.