The Nicaragua Experience Was Fantastic.....

I went in with a group I had never met until we joined up at the Houston airport, went to a county I wasn’t familiar with, and worked on a project I’d been warned would be “primitive” at best. Eight of us met up at the airport and flew down together—a mixed group of five women and three men including three teenagers.
We arrived in Nicaragua after dark on Sunday night and were met and driven to the CEPAD headquarters in Managua. We spent Monday and part of Tuesday in orientations then drove about an hour to the town of Jinotepe near Lake Nicaragua.
CEPAD is a Spanish acronym for Protestant Council of Churches in Nicaragua and does not provide aid but, instead, provides services that prepare and teach the Nicaraguans in the countryside to help themselves. After generations of brutal dictatorship, a ten-year civil war that cost nearly 100,000 lives—mostly civilian—and a recent administration of graft and corruption the Nicaraguan society has been turned upside down. A confusing mixture of agrarian reform coupled with massive unemployment in the cities has resulted in a generation of Nicaraguans being forced into the countryside with absolutely no idea how to use the land to even feed their own families much less establish an agricultural economy. That’s why CEPAD focuses on assisting rather than donating goods.
In the case of our group, our goal was to refurbish a school in the SE area of Nicaragua in a town called Jinotepe. When the Sandinistas overthrew the government in 1978 they established free education for all children but, unfortunately there was never enough money to follow through and today there is rudimentary education through six years. We were working on an abandoned church school so CEPAD could offer education after the sixth year which is basically “adult education.”
We lived in the school itself while we were working on it. There was electricity most of the time but not all. The school had three small bathrooms with commodes but no running water so the commodes had to be flushed by the “pouring out of the bucket” method and showers consisted of a barrel of water, a bucket and a dipper with which to “dip and pour” cold water in a drain area. We slept on concrete floors with thin mattresses the first two nights.
This was an excellent group for me to break in with—they included me immediately—and I took to their work effort right away. When we worked it was very intensive and we tended to go until dark each day. We started by stripping and painting the interior walls of the open-air rooms, sanding and refinishing donated student desks, and ended by painting the exterior of the building.
One room in particular left an impression with me: It was in shambles when we started and we refinished it in time for three of the adults to use it for their graduation dissertations before parents and school administrators and we were invited to sit in. I am attaching “before, during, and after” photographs to the left. The student presentations were very well prepared—these three students will probably go on to a university in Managua next year. What struck me in the midst of all this poverty was that their parents dressed in their finest clothing and brought their children. When the candidates made their presentations to the school administrators their parents stood on the stage beside them and you could see the pride. CEPAD had provided the school with a computer and projector so you had the odd situation of seeing a PowerPoint presentation in a school that often had no electricity. For our group this was instant gratification because three days earlier the room had been in shambles and was now being used as a real school. Incidentally, when we left, the students used this same room to give us a farewell ceremony with music and folk dancing.
That day it rained so hard and so long that our mattresses were soaked as well as our bedding. Then the temperature dropped unseasonably cold so we went into town and found a hostel operated by some missionaries for $10/night and spent the final two nights there and traveled back and forth to the school.
On the trip there we stopped at a farmer’s market and bought food and we had a woman who cooked for us at the school. She used a two-burner stove in not the best of sanitary conditions but turned out some of the best food and only a couple of the group suffered minor health problems—we definitely ate “local.”
On Friday we finished around noon and drove out into the countryside to visit three farms CEPAD has been working with. The first farmer was a former Contra soldier who had moved to the area with his wife and three children a couple of years earlier and was trying to feed his family on about ¾ of an acre. CEPAD has provided him with barbed wire to keep animals out of his crops and advised him on how to set up drainage and erosion barriers and has given him a “starter kit” of banana trees and other crops. The family lives in a one-room cinderblock house with no electricity, running water, or even glass in the windows but this guy was already feeding his family and even selling some crops at the local market. CEPAD advisors had taught him grafting, composting, fertilizing and basically turned him into a successful farmer in a couple of years. In return, he has to provide “starter kits” to five others as well as advise them. In that way he pays back what he received.
The second farm we visited was a similar story only the man had used the plants to develop a moderately successful nursery and was selling plants at the local market and for landscaping projects.
The third project was unique in that it involved a “women’s commune” (there are a lot of “war widows” here). Here the “starter kits” were piglets and chickens and the women were taught how to raise, breed and sell the animals while expanding their own livestock. In some of the most impoverished conditions I’ve seen outside of Africa, these really poor women were just absolutely proud of what they’d accomplished. In return they had to provide starter animals and information to five other communes……The program isn’t solving the problem of poverty in Nicaragua but these families aren’t starving and even showing some improvement in all aspects of their lives. The children were especially touching and like kids everywhere, they loved to have their pictures taken and then look at them on our digital cameras.
We finished the school on Saturday and the students gave us our farewell ceremony. They prayed, sang, gave speeches and then gave us each a tee-shirt as thanks. The best part was when two little girls in native dresses came in and danced traditional dances to Nicaraguanmusic. Double-click the picture and check her out......
We returned to Managua Saturday night and stayed at the CEPAD headquarters but did slip out and find a pizza parlor. Sunday was our “tourist” day but rained all day as well and we were frankly so tired physically we all looked like zombies. We drove up on one of the mountains overlooking Managua that was an old prison and is now a public park with a great view of the city. We also visited the ancient cathedral that was destroyed by the 1972 earthquake as well as the new cathedral that is butt-ugly. The old church was Spanish architecture but so badly damaged by the earthquake it had to be abandoned. The new cathedral was mostly financed by the owner of Pizza Hut who is a member of the Opus Dei sect of the Catholic Church that received so much negative and controversial publicity in The da Vinci Code. It was free, but even the locals dislike the design--they refer to it as "Our Lady of Lactation." It was raining too hard and too foggy to visit the volcano so we took a boat ride on Lake Nicaragua and ended the day eating at an El Salvadorian café in town.
Early Monday morning we caught our flight back to Houston. I intend to do a lot more of these trips and this group seems to stick together and do a couple a year.