Unless you’ve stayed up all night studying capital cities for a pub quiz, it’s safe to say you won’t have heard of Puerto Cabezas, the small, but bustling, urban centre of the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region of Nicaragua.
The city, better known as Bilwi in the local Miskito language, can be a tough place to live. Power outages are rampant and road access is patchy, schools are overcrowded and the costs of basic supplies can be exorbitant. For Bilwi’s youth, the traps of drugs and gang violence are all too easy to get caught up in.
Surrounded by rivers and lagoons and facing out on to an Atlantic sea-scape, good water, ironically, is hard to come by. Just 20% of Bilwi can tap into the limited municipal water supply, with public waterways and streams visibly polluted. Only half of the city’s population has access to toilets.
