The Start

The volunteers have all arrived, all 55 of them. After about a week of training, they left for their communities interchanging with the local youth and collaborating to organize the completion of a minio-project of the communities´ choosing.

Its going to be an interesting 6 weeks for them as they have to acclimate to the different idiosyncracies of the life in the campo. Nonetheless, each and everyone of them will have the time of their life. Being so young, the age range is 15-19, and to live so completely differently than normally acheived in the United States makes a large impact on these youth - hence the reason why I think this organization is amazing. It is part of service learning that allow our nation´s youth to live like the bottom billion, to see the struggles and the hard work of subsistence agricultural lifestyles, to see the beauty and the value in community and family, understand simple living. They will come back the better from this experience, and maybe they will not change immediately upon their return, as peer pressure makes many people revert to the status quo, but Amigos has planted the seed. Over the years, it will nuture and with their growing confidence, so too will the tree burgeon that has taken root, and their lives in the future will be focused on serving others instead of vainly living merely for their own self gratification.

One item, I think, that could be improved though, is the sustainability in that year after year, volunteer, supervisor and director, jump ship and join a new project the next summer, a new adventure to see a new country with it´s new experiences and new populations. Although it is clear that our neophile personalities lead this desultory behavoir, it is important to realize that stability is good thing for an organization. This is why this year I am really pushing for one of the team members to return this year to carry on this project in 2011. The bonds with our partnering agency will start strong, an understanding of the culture and the area will be prfound and with it a new project can start running and lead to a better 2011 than 2010 in Matagalpa, Nicaragua.