My life in the Masaya Rotary Club
by Angeles Bermudez
Reprinted from National Driller, Dec. 2004

My name is Angeles Bermudez, and I was born in 1948 to a family with a strong Rotarian feeling. The Rotary Club of Masaya, Nicaragua, was founded in 1945 by a group of altruistic men who wanted to serve in their poor communities. One of the founding members of the Club was my father, Roberto Bermudez, who belonged to the club for more than 30 years. I used to participate with my parents in all the events that a RC develops throughout the year.

I left Nicaragua in 1969 but returned home in 1997. In 2000, I received a phone call from my childhood friend, Julio Cuadra, a member of the RC of Tulsa, Oklahoma, asking me to contact the members of the RC Masaya because there was a rig that had to come to Nicaragua.

I was not a Rotarian when Julio called me, but I went to visit my daddy's old friends and found one of the founder members still alive, Raul Sanchez, and another old friend, Alejandro Castillo. I convened the meeting and we met at the Old Red Cross in Masaya, where we were given the worse room, in front of a bathroom without a door. I could not believe the RC Masaya could be in that situation! One week later, I asked my eldest sister to lend me her house to hold another meeting and explain to the Rotarians and the officials from ENACAL, the State Water Company, what the RC Tulsa was offering for Masaya.

Then, I met younger blood and began having contact with more Rotarians. At the end of 2000, I moved from Managua back to Masaya, my birthplace, and was invited by my sponsor, Alejandro Castillo, to join the RC Masaya. I was sworn in as a Rotarian in November 2006 and since then, I have held the International Service Chair until this year (2006-2007), andI am the President of the RC Masaya.

I began in 2000 to work hard on the importation of the donation offered by Tulsa. I exchanged hundreds of mails with my fellow Rotarians in Oklahoma until we finally received the rig, a pick-up truck, medical supplies, wheelchairs, etc. We found help from the Government to get the import duty-free. As the President and First Lady of Nicaragua, Mr. and Mrs. Enrique Bolaños, are from Masaya, know Rotary very well and are aware of what Rotary does around the world, they trusted us and decided to help us with the importation of the goods without paying the custom's duties. That was a great relief!

In 2003, a mission came from Tulsa, headed by Bob Scroggs, a Rotarian, and Mickey Moore, the driller. We started drilling the wells in the vicinity of Masaya. It was so hard because we were drilling volcanic rock, and each operation required more than 2,000 gallons of water... in a place without water. We had to ask the Fire Brigade from Managua to supply the water for our project and the first two wells were drilled with great effort and pain. When drilling in El Portillo, outside Masaya, we received a visit from Cindy Sakala from a Rotary Club in Philadelphia; she saw with her own eyes the tremendous lack of water to drill, and she offered to go back to her club and raise money to buy a compressor to drill with air instead of water. That compressor was a heaven-send, allowing Mickey and the Nicaraguan team to drill more than 60 wells in the one or two months he visits my country every year.

The planning and organization is done in Masaya with the team from Tulsa. We receive the requests for wells and then give priority according to their chronological order or to the geographical areas that we have to cover. So far, we have drilled wells on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua, where our rig can drill wells of less than 300 feet deep. Heretofore, the drilling has been done with the interaction with other RC in different towns. This year's mission was a tremendous success, for we drilled more than 30 wells with Mickey, supplying water to more than 20,000 people in very poor communities along the Pacific Coast.

As International Service Chair, I also organize, with the rest of the Club, the visit of the VOSH Brigade, from Rhode Island North East, where three Rotarians are involved and 67 more members who compose the Brigade. The Voluntary Ophthalmologists to the Service of Humanity like to work with the RC Masaya and they have been coming for the last 5 years, attending more than 4,000 thousand people in 4 days, performing 45 cataracts operation at the Masaya Hospital, giving dental services, medicines, glasses and this year, they introduced the hearing aids made to measure which have solved the problem of hundreds of people hard of hearing. We have rotated in different places in the Department of Masaya and for the year 2007, we have organized the visit again to Masaya, where we will attend at the indigenous Barrio of Monimbo, where there is a high concentration of poor people and the Salesian Fathers have already committed to lend us the premises of a new school for poor children.

Another successful project of the International Service Avenue with the rest of the Club was the Reforestation of the Mombacho Volcano with a MG with TRF and the RC Ventura East California. We managed to plant more than 700 acres with precious woods, cocoa, coffee, flower and fruit trees, etc. More than a 100 families who live in the outskirts of the volcano benefited from this project.

The International Service Avenue also interacts with the Nicaraguan American Chamber of Commerce of California. They donate wheelchairs, walkers, portable toilets and canes which we distribute among the poor handicapped population of Masaya.

As President of the 2006-2007 Rotary year, I hope to continue with the coordination of the Water Well Project in Nicaragua with the aim to make this project run throughout the year. It is a difficult task, taking into consideration the capacity of the drill, but if we get help from the Clubs of your District 6110, we can accomplish much more and we can quench the thirst of hundreds of people in need of the vital liquid.