Volunteer Roger in Nicaragua constructed an outdoor oven for a family in his community. After completing the oven, the family went on to make baked goods which they sold to community members–providing them an extra source of income
Me teaching about the materials that go into organic compost and digging and filling our compost pit with help from the students at Si, A La Vida (a non profit that works with at risk youth and developmentally disabled youth)
Part of our job as PCVs is to work with the schools to establish a
school garden. Although the school garden is included in the curriculum and is
required by the government, very few schools actually have gardens. Working on
the garden was a long process spanning several weeks and required a lot of
motivating the hot and tired students.
Finally planting the squash!
Parents and students working together to form the seed beds
Working hard to sift the soil for the seed bed
Taking care of the squash plant
As hot and stressful and challenging as it was, photos like this (below), make it worth it
Through a recommendation from a friend in Granada last weekend I decided to track down a cooperative of ladies who make woven blankets in Leon. I had seen their work in the Garden Café gift shop in Granada and admired their unique designs and simple style. I got their contact information and called the number to find their shop in Leon. A welcoming woman’s voice answered the phone and gave me directions to walk from the center of Leon to the workshop. I was greeted warmly and ushered into the back of a house where three women were working at their looms. They showed me a table piled high with blankets in different styles, color combinations and sizes.
They were patient as I examined their blankets, attempting to make a decision. As I admired their work, they explained to me that their great grandmother started the business before the Nicaraguan revolution and passed down the trade and skills to her children and her children’s children. Four ladies and one man work in the small workshop on five hand-made wooden looms. Finally after much contemplation and deliberation I decided on a blanket to purchase. It was so difficult, I wanted them all! The ladies were so kind and let me take their picture. From left to right: Dora, Juliana and Lilian.
It’s finally winter and therefore time to…start planting? Although that
sounds strange to us Americans, here the rainy season is called invierno (winter), and is the time to
start the school garden. Every school is required to have a garden and the
crops are (supposedly) used for the school merienda
(snack) and to add some severely needed vegetables to the students’ diet.
Although we didn’t get as much done as I had hoped due to some lack of
motivation and lack of purpose (for the female students who kept being told to
hand the tools over to the boys because they are stronger and better at manual
labor), it’s a good start!
The past two weeks have been a WHIRLWIND – aside from Counterpart Day and visiting our future sites (see the last post), we also had the culminations of our work during training – the Product Fair for our entrepreneurship youth group, co-teaching our last class with our counterpart teachers, planning a group Teacher Training, teaching a mock class to our fellow Trainees, going to lots of Spanish classes, and writing lots of essays about our experiences, in both English and Spanish.
First, I finally want to tell you more about the entrepreneurship youth group we’ve been holding throughout training. Basically, my training town group and I have had a group of especially bright 10th and 11th graders (usually about 5-8 people), meeting once or twice every week to develop a product idea and a microbusiness, then applying lessons about feasibility, creativity, SWOT analysis, point of equilibrium, finances, teamwork, and marketing to their business and creating a full business plan.
Our group initially had had difficulty deciding on a product, but finally chose to create an all-natural pesticide and fertilizer that was good for the planet. It was a logical choice, seeing as literally everyone and their cousin here has a garden with lots of fruit trees and other plants. We struggled a lot with attendance sometimes, with different kids coming different weeks, and at the end we ran into a mini-crisis when Keyssler, the student who was the leader and had been doing most of the work, found out she couldn’t go to the competition because she had a math competition the same day. At first, this was devastating – what were we going to do?! But ultimately, it worked out for the best – when Keyssler was no longer there to do all the work, the other students had an opportunity to shine and grow in ways that I don’t think they could have with Keyssler there in the spotlight.
This group has worked so incredibly hard, meeting outside of our twice weekly meetings to keep the ball rolling, and doing a whole lot of homework … all on top of their regular schoolwork. Everything culminated last week in a Product Fair, in which the five groups (ours + the other training towns’ groups) all competed in a Shark Tank-like competition, pitching their product and answering questions from the judges. They really pulled themselves together in the final weeks, and by the day of the competition, they were a little group of professionals. It was so cute to see them all on the bus and at the competition, going through their parts of the presentation, memorizing things and practicing. In the end, we won the award for “Most Creative Product”! The kids felt good about themselves, and my group and I were so incredibly proud. It’s really a testament to how much can be accomplished in a short period of time, and also to the immense potential in each one of these students.
The other wrapping-up that took place recently was finishing up co-planning and co-teaching our classes with our counterpart teachers during training. My counterpart teacher’s name is Judith, and she’s quite nice. There’s so much more I wish I could do with her – this was training, so I was just learning to co-plan effectively, and I definitely could have done a better job challenging her and working together to make sure she truly understands the material before we taught it together. But in the end, I think we conveyed all the material more or less effectively, and in a fun and dynamic way. I hope she’ll continue to use more dynamic teaching methods once we’re gone, but honestly, I’m not holding my breath; the Nicaraguan teaching system is extremely lecture-based, and encouragement of critical thinking is scant, and I don’t think that in these three months we could really change that entrenched system. But I do hope we made the littlest difference, at least for this group of students. And we certainly learned a lot ourselves.
Seeing as this was my class session with them, at the end, I said goodbye and put my email address on the board and wished them well. To my surprise, a female student stood up and asked if she could say something. She and another student lugged up a huge cardboard box chock-full of fruit – pineapples, avocadoes, oranges, bananas, a watermelon, a cantaloupe, even a coconut – and told me that the class had held a fruit drive to collect fruit to thank me for being here. I was absolutely speechless. I don’t even know my 68 (yes, 68) students that well – because I’ve been sick so much, I’ve actually missed probably three classes, having had to switch with other Trainees and teach their sections sometimes, which means I’ve only taught the class maybe four times. And yet here they were being so incredibly generous and kind. The box weighed at least forty pounds, and two students had to help me carry it to the door of the school, where I was forced to take a moto-taxi home. I was nearly crying, I was so touched; these people have so little, and yet they are so generous. Of course, I couldn’t leave before taking zillions of photos with all of them and feeling like a celebrity. My host mom made a fruit salad with the fruit, and it was the most delicious fruit salad I’ve ever tasted, full of the love from my students. Experiences like that day make everything worth it. Everything.
Eating warm, salty and sweet
la güirila that are made from ground corn, sugar, grated cheese a little bit of milk. They’re heated and served with a chunk of salty cuajada cheese!
Check out this amazing photo of Peace Corps Nicaragua! There are 177 Volunteers in Nicaragua working with their communities on projects in community economic development, English education, the environment and health. During their service in Nicaragua, Volunteers learn to speak Spanish. More than 2,445 Peace Corps Volunteers have served in Nicaragua since the program was established in 1968.
http://bit.ly/21y2TVJ
