After 19 years, Bainbridge and Ometepe, Nicaragua, enjoy close ties, meaningful trade.

BALGUE, NICARAGUA – Kim Esterberg has been making the hike up to Finca Magdalena coffee cooperative for nearly 20 years.

Despite his growing familiarity with the terrain, each trip seems to take a little longer than the last.

Just as he takes his first steps, a young girl calls him over from her small brickand-mortar home, offering to deliver homemade enchiladas for his breakfast the next morning.

As the road gets steeper and rockier, he is greeted by a young man wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt. They embrace warmly, and Esterberg tells him he still has photos of the teenager when he was only knee-high.

After a stop to listen to the guttural roar of monkeys bounding from the branches above, Esterberg spots one of the cooperative’s founders striding up the road.

Esterberg hails him, and the man’s sun-worn wrinkles suddenly radiate from a wide smile.

“I’ve seen a dream realized,” Esterberg said Monday, relaxing under the thatched roof hut that serves as the coffee cooperative’s break room. “I wanted to see a long-term relationship with many connections between our islands.

“I have no more grand plans than that – just to keep developing relationships here.”

Despite his humble goals, the connections Esterberg has fostered through the Bainbridge-Ometepe Sister Islands Association have led to cleaner water on the Nicaraguan island, more schools, college educations for some of the island’s poorest, increased literacy and a lifeline for the farmers of the struggling organic coffee plantation.

None of these ongoing projects were imaginable to Esterberg when he journeyed to Nicaragua in 1986.

He was simply looking for a way to reach past the U.S. policies of the time and offer direct human connections and a platform for international friendships.

“I was involved in the early ’80s peace movement on Bainbridge Island that had formed to oppose the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America,” Esterberg said. “We were against the right wing government in El Salvador, the death squads in Guatemala and the Contras in Nicaragua. We were having speakers, leafleting and talking about these things in a global, abstract context.

“I wanted to have something that was direct, that humanized the relationship between the two places. I thought that could be a model for peace.”

Esterberg flew into Managua in the midst of a civil war between the U.S.-backed Contra rebels and the Sandinista government, which had overthrown the corrupt Samoza regime just seven years before.

“I was ushered off the plane onto streets bristling with machine guns and tanks,” he said. “And I thought, ‘how did I ever get into this?’”

Armed with pictures of kids at Wilkes Elementary School, the ferry, Winslow Way and other slices of Bainbridge life, Esterberg left the capital city and set out looking for a sister island.

He soon found Ometepe, a place with the same feeling of “isolation and closeness” as on Bainbridge, where “people are always banging into each other at the store” and nod knowingly when the inexplicable sense of “island-ness” is discussed.

Esterberg toured the island, which is about twice the size of Bainbridge, with the mayors of the towns of Altagracia and Moyogalpa.

Aboard a rusted jeep, they bounced along dirt roads, taking in the island’s twin volcanos, the many rice and corn farms and finally a nighttime swim under a gentle swarm of fireflies.

“When I came home, I brought back hope and enthusiasm that a sister island relationship might be really cool,” he said.

His enthusiasm spread and by 1988 the newly formed association had completed its first joint project with Ometepe, raising $3,000 to build a new preschool in Altagracia.

His work on the preschool project with a local priest, Father Juan Quadra, taught Esterberg a valuable lesson that has guided all BOSIA projects.

“He taught us that it has to be about collaboration,” Esterberg said. “He said the project would only be meaningful to people on Ometepe if they put their own sweat and blood into it. He didn’t want us to be ‘the great benefactor’ because that doesn’t foster a sense of equality or a healthy long-term relationship. And we said, ‘Wow, he’s right.’”

Also in 1988, Esterberg led BOSIA’s first delegation to Ometepe and to a pivotal first visit to farm co-op Finca Magdalena.

“The Sandinistas had noble goals in trying to help the poor and doing land reform in the countryside, and we could see that in action at the cooperative,” he said. “We wanted to help sell their beans but the embargo prevented us from doing so.”

Members of the BOSIA delegation sent coffee beans from the 25-member cooperative to their Congressman, urging him to help pop the lock on trade imposed against Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution.

The U.S. eventually did end the embargo, but it wasn’t a jolt of caffeine that spurred them to do so. The embargo evaporated the day the Sandinista government was voted out of office in 1990.

The U.S. stamp of approval on the new government meant Ometepe farmers xxxx Suitcases loaded with green beans from the cooperative were taken by BOSIA volunteers to Pegasus Roasters on Bainbridge.

The beans sold well enough in island stores and coffee shops that BOSIA bought Finca Magdalena’s entire crop the next year.

BOSIA used all coffee profits to build a clean water system for the Ometepe town of San Pedro.

Coffee sales have continued to grow, bankrolling clean water projects in a half dozen other Ometepe communities.

As with BOSIA’s first project, bringing clean water down from a mountain lake required local muscle to go with the Bainbridge bucks.

BOSIA now has an office in Altagracia funneling a stream of project requests. A Bainbridge volunteer and two paid staffers from Ometepe help coordinate applications for new schools, septic systems, scholarships and other improvements.

After a 19-year relationship and a growing list of achievements, many Ometepe residents are quick to sing Esterberg’s praises.

A group of Ometepe third graders did just that, singing “Des Colores” for Esterberg when he entered their classroom for a visit Tuesday.

“Never before did we think we’d have people like you in our lives,” their teacher Maria Antonia Barrios Gonzalez, said to Esterberg. “That God has brought you here is such a blessing.”