In order to fix the road to the Geek Ranch, we had to secure permission from the owners of the property along the road. What was required in addition to them signing the permission form was a copy of their ID card or cédula. While that sounds easy in Houston, not so near the Geek Ranch.

There are lots of copy centers in Estelí with great prices—typically less than $.02/copy— but we are not in Estelí. There might be a place that makes photocopies in San Nicolas, about a 15km round trip but I am not sure.

The alternative: a closeup photo of the front and back of each cédula with a digital camera. I then used the unlikely graphics took, KWord, to do the dirtywork. KWord is frame oriented so it is trivial to import two photos (front and back) per page and scale them so they look about the right size. Pretty high tech for our neighbors.