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Nicaragua and the autonomous regions Introducing the HoverAid Hovercare project Project History and background
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Project History and Background |
The Hovercare project has grown out of the work of the Peace and Hope trust, operating in Nicaragua since the end of the civil-war.
The trust responded to a direct challenge from the then President of Nicaragua, Doña Violetta de Chomorro, and Great Britain’s Ambassador to Nicaragua, to find a way of linking the isolated Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua with the more affluent Pacific coast. In 1995 the trust's director, Mike Cole, lead The British Hovercraft Expedition to Nicaragua and used two hovercraft to successfully cross Nicaragua and demonstrate the ability of the vehicles to provide the desperately needed link between the separate regions.
Hovercraft expedition Griffon 2000 on Lake Nicaragua in 1995
The expedition showed how hovercraft could be used to establish a communication link between the isolated villages of Nicaragua and its larger cities. It revealed the true isolation of hundreds of thousands of people living on the Atlantic Coast and from that time onwards the Peace and Hope Trust focussed its mission on serving them in better ways.
RR501 on the Rio San Juan in Nicaragua in 1995
Since 1995 hovercraft have developed further, and in recent years technologies have been established to enable medical operating theatres to become mobile. A combination of these advances allows the future possibility of a hovercraft based mobile clinic or even operating theatre.
In August 2007, in response to these improvements in technology, a small team from the Peace and Hope Trust spent three weeks on the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast assessing the potential viability of using hovercraft to meet the needs of the isolated villages in these areas. From this initial work the Hovercare Project has developed.