Boom
Andrés Bello Elementary School, Boom, Río Coco
Some time ago there was a large building with the letters B-O-O-M painted on its metal roof, visible to all who passed by this village on the Coco River. Pastor Onofre Zamora, one of our Seek the Lamb administrators and native of Boom, can show you the cement slab where that building once stood. It belonged to the Bragman’s Bluff Lumber Company, which extracted giant mahogany logs from the forests upstream and kept them in the calm of a sweeping bend at this site until the export ship came and anchored offshore. A boom, as a logging term, refers to a series of logs chained together as a containment. The lumber company set up a station here and employed many Miskito people, and that’s how the village thrived here and was given its name.
Bird’s eye view of Boom
Missionaries first came to Boom in the early ‘50’s. While Catholics focused on adjacent Klampa, the Moravians chose to concentrate on Boom. Today, Boom is almost exclusively Moravian. Two of our school teachers are sons of the Moravian lay pastor who served until one of them succeeded him shortly before his death a few years ago.
Boom is one of our smaller villages, with a little less than 600 inhabitants. The low, swampy ground on which it sits is not capable of supporting a large population, and many natives resettled elsewhere during and after the war years in the ‘80’s. Some, like Onofre, have excelled as professionals.
Iksa Webster in her classroom.
Other non-profit agencies have partnered with us and the inhabitants of Boom in recent years. Young volunteers from a Dutch organization worked side-by-side with natives to erect 2 new buildings for Andres Bello Elementary School, and an Italian outfit taught people to manufacture ferro-cement tanks for rainwater catchment. Marcos Conrado, a Seek the Lamb teacher, served as point man for both projects, earning high praise from the agencies for his trustworthiness and efficiency.
Teacher Marcos Conrado with his family