Here are a few images of Pantanal, the largest concentration of the worst living conditions in the Granada region.  There are a few main paved roads, actual the same block/cobble type found throughout Granada, not much city water, and a lot of dirt floor houses.  The first image below is a small school run by Education Plus, a small NGO doing a lot for a bunch of kids.  A friend whose daughter works here took us on a tour, Gretchen on the friend’s scooter and me following on my rickety $2/week rented mountain bike.  This is very near the school that I started teaching at today.  More about that later, including my taxi driver getting lost on my way this morning.  While I’ve now walked extensively throughout Pantanal on my way back to Granada, I still don’t have any good shots of the typical scrap wood/metal houses in the heart of the residential section.

Every house built recently seems to have this concrete post and beam design.  I’ve heard that the posts/beams are reinforced with rebar, but the block infill sections are not.  In speaking with a Canadian architect who built his own house here a few years ago and another builder, this seems perfectly safe despite being surrounded by active volcanoes.   Another shot below shows some very old adobe type construction, and some rare anti-Ortega graffiti.  Everything in the outskirts is on septic.  Two things are still very unclear to me: Granada proper seems to be all septic pits too, although there are sanitary sewer manholes, evidence of trenching and reports of the City connecting a bunch of neighborhoods to sewer lines.  Meanwhile, “water” flows out of every building directly into the gutter constantly.  From our house, I’m pretty sure its just coming from our lavandera (our clothes washing station) to the gutter out front.  Our friends house up the street is only septic and just had to be pumped out.  Apparently the first person they talked to offered to come late and night and use buckets to empty the tank into the gutter. They chose to wait for the pump truck to do it legit, thankfully since we live downhill from them.