POST by RENZ: A Horse and Carriage is like Love and Marriage

Fran, Jamil, Yader and Oliver, saddling up "Mexico" for a drive

Here in Nicaragua, people have horses and they have carts. They use them for a lot of things. For example, they bring fire wood to cook food, go from one place to another transporting objects, and things like that.

As you may know, we have five horses. My dad wanted a cart to collect the school kids everyday because some kids do not come anymore because their parents say that it is too long of a walk. So a father of one of the school kids built my dad a cart.

The first day of having the cart we decided to test it out with one of the horses. We took Cookie, the biggest horse, a male, and before we bought him, the old owner would use him to drive a cart.

They put all the stuff on the horse and we set out the gate. Yader, Jamil, Francesca, Sezni, and I all got on. Yader and Jamil told us to sit on the edges because it was the first time in a long while that that horse had driven one of the carts so he might not behave so well and so if something bad should happen and he went crazy, we would be able to jump off, which would mean that we wouldn't get hurt so much.

We went down the dirt road until we got to Yader's house. At the end of Yader's house, there is a downhill and then an uphill. Cookie doesn't like going down hills or up hills even if you are riding on him so we stopped at Yader's house to calm him down and make him go down the hill. When we were ready to go down the hill, Grace, Francesca, and I all jumped off because we could feel that he was not wanting to go down the hill.

We ran down the hill and waited at the bottom. Once they started going downhill, they were going down not fast, but not slow, so like medium. When they got to the bottom of the hill the horse started running, so we quickly moved out of the way because the horse looked angry.

Once the horse reached the top of the hill, it stopped. Yader and Jamil were yelling and whipping so that Cookie would move but he would only go in circles.

Yader eventually got tired of yelling and whipping. He decided that we should go back home so he turned the horse around and told us to get on. We got on and went down the hill again. We went all the way down to the gate of our house and stopped. My dad opened the gate but Cookie did not move. He just put his head all the way down to his feet and rubbed against the ropes and chains to try and get them off.

Yader and Jamil once again started whipping and yelling and the horse moved in circles. Grace, Francesca, and I jumped off and I went to were my dad was standing. My dad explained to me that the horse was bleeding on its leg. He had a small cut on his leg and it was bleeding but it wasn't a huge scratch.

Then my dad looked closer and told everyone that was standing there that he was bleeding on his neck and it was from the collar around his neck. Driving our new horse and car is fun but makes for a long day out!