Jobs

On the bus ride to Managua to Matagalpa, very often the bus would stop intermittently at the different cities on the way. Each time the bus stopped, there would be five to ten people who would rush to surround the bus yelling, “Agua, 10 centavos, Agua, 10 centavos”. Or “Caramelo, 5 centavos”. It was interesting that that is their full time job. Day after day, with bags of cold water on their shoulder, standing in the heat, yelling at the passengers to consume their product for pennies. How much can they be making for their job by selling products for under 5 cents? I rarely saw anyone purchasing anything on the bus I was on.

Interestingly it compares rather unfavorably with some American workers who have the gall to complain about their work. It is true that there is more to work than the working conditions, but some of these American employees who complain are sitting in nice chairs at desks, they have air conditioning and are working on a computer. Although one can want another job, or a better job, or a promotion, it is important to realize what we are given, the comfort and the opportunities we have.

CARE

CARE Mi Cuenca. Matagalpa's partnering agency this year. It is great travelling to the airport and other places and seeing signs about this organization. I know the effect that have in Nicaragua and I will learn more about their impact this summer.

Community Based Initiatives

CBI's are the main project completed in each community over the summer. The concept is to work with the community using asset based community development theory and for the volunteers to be a catalyst for an initiative based in the community. The idea is to use the community's resources and have them work together cohesively as a unit to improve their own neighborhood and community. We also want the community to have a stake in the project, so that is why we don't provide labor, and want them to fundraise for at least half of the initiative. If the community really wants something, they will make it happen.

Partnering with other organizations helps achieve sustainability. Reality is, we will be there 2 months, if we complete a project that the volunteers are leading, it will likely stop once the volunteers leave. The goal is to develop something the community can keep building on after we leave. The goal is not a completed community kitchen at the end of the summer, the goal is the process the community took to get there. It is for the community to organize, work together, learn that they can do things on their own.

Another organization FSD international, very similar to Amigos except for college and post-grad volunteers, created a sustainable trash pick up in their community and really got the students from the school to take the initiative to work together to make a sustainable program. Read more with the link:

http://fsdinternational.org/whyfsd/currentprojects/nicaragua1

Matagalpa Treck

It has been great in Nicaragua so far. Just would like to share a couple highlights. The taxi driver from the airport mentioned he hoped there was going to be a coup this summer because he wants Ortega out of office, then the lady at the front desk of the hotel said only positive words about the work Ortega has done for Nicaragua. Then others claim, they don't care who is in office, as long as they help out the community.

Also, we had a meeting at the Ministry of Education with the Director of Primary Education. His assistant started the meeting by quoting the bible, separation of church and state? Then on the wall there were pictures of Che Guivara, Sandino and FSLN. During the meeting he boasted how Nicaragua has an illiteracy rate of 3.3% which is the 4^th lowest in all of the Americas, only following Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. After a small amount of probing different reputable sources claim illiteracy rates are anywhere from 15 to 30 percent! I would like to know from where this information is obtained? Who did the study, how it was conducted? And more importantly, why aren’t people asking the right questions to uncover the discrepencies?

Another note I took was how it looked like a fashion show walking into the US Embassy! It just seemed that the only local Nicaraguans who worked there had to have some connection to get in the door to that privileged job, but I could be wrong… Guthrie? :) However, it was a beautiful campus though and it made me really appreciate how lucky we are as Americans since our government takes such good care of us even outside of our country! It also made me think that it was a great decision on our part to choose to be born here...

Another note, the meeting with a local NGO, ADP was such a positive experience. It was amazing to see what the good people are accomplishing around the world and the impact it has on people’s lives. They showed us a picture of a waterfall from 20 years ago that was a small trickle down the side of the mountain, then after 20 years of planning trees around the water source and along the path of the river, the trickle now has become a healthy down pour. They mentioned deforestation is causing water sources to dry up and even mentioned specifically that if nothing is done in Matagalapa, water will stop flowing there in several decades. It really puts our work into perspective about what we are trying to accomplish this summer.

Projects

Under a week until I travel to Nicaragua. I have been swamped with work, projects around the city, classes – so I am really looking forward to next Tuesday, Feb 16, leaving the daily grind! I have been talking to a friend who as an undergrad took an engineering course about the development of third world countries and she gave me some great ideas about projects she worked with in her class! To be brief, one is a corn husker that was “found” in Ghana, used to de-kernel the corn.

Last summer in Costa Rica, families would go through hundreds of ears of corn by hand, and when there is this simple tool, that costs under 2 dollars to make to help speed the process and would make it easier on their wrists so they can dedicate their time to other activities, it would be nice that they could know about it. I am excited on sharing this with Nicaraguan families and I hope they find it beneficial.

This other idea gives instructs on how to turn a bike into a little machine that can easily turn a blender, a washing machine or anything that needs rotational force. What is nice about this idea, is that it doesn’t require complicated equipment to convert this rotational energy into electrical energy which is difficult to repair and is expensive. We'll see how well these ideas are accepted in the field.

Well - not too much else to say right now, I'll have updates from the field soon.

Introduction - Matagapla 2010

This year it turns out that I will spend my summer in Matagalpa, Nicaragua as the project director . I have a trip planned in February 16 - February 27 to set up some logistics, then training in March and finally summer which starts early June.

First, all the posts on here before 2009 are from my stint in Honduras/Costa Rica.

Second, the slideshow at the right will be of only Nicaragua pictures after February once I return from survey.

And third, I have been thinking about the summer quite a bit mostly because I am really looking forward to it, and also because I really want this to be a positive experience for everyone involved: from the team, to the communities, the youth (North American and Nicaraguan), locals and families in Matagapa, etc. If I am travelling down to Nicaragua, I want it to be for something positive, and of course that is why I chose to go down with Amigos. And of my many goals this summer, one is to empower the staff team and help foster an environment of growth over the course of the summer. Imagine a team where all members are capable of being project director (PD), all are empowered to make decisions when warranted and all have the confidence to step up when needed. I think knowledge is power and so one way I am going to help achieve this goal is by sharing the information that I have.

Sometimes, leaders can keep information to themselves, whether intentionally or not, and that leads to the effect of having that one person required to make all the decisions, thus becoming a crutch for the team. I believe in transparency (as haughtily liberal that may sound) and through the dissimenation of information (when applicable, because of course there are exceptions!)empowers others to make their own decisions and allows them to rely on their own knowledge to act. As the PD, I have all the information from last year at my disposal, I have contacts from the prevoius projects and I will be on survey meeting with local partners. Sharing all this information is difficult and maybe even impractical, but I will try to have most of it available for those who are interested - currently in gdocs.

Maybe I am coming into this from a different perspective, as I was a little older as a project supervisor, I was already thinking about the next step, the next growing opportunity, so I wanted to access all the information my project director had. This is why I am sharing the information now, even if no one on the team decides to read it, it is completely fine as it is not imperative, but for those who are thinking about growth opportunities, it is my goal to provide no barriers for anyone to achieve their goals!

Also, as a side note, I have been in contact with many local NGO's in Matagalpa and I am exteremly excited about the connections the team and the program will have during the summer.

Caution: Sloth Crossing

On my last day in Costa Rica when I was in the airport heading home, I was about to write about beans, how hard they are to harvest, how they are good for us and how lucky we are to have access to them with such little effort ($1 a pound!!!). But I got bored of that and instead let my mind wonder... as you will see, my mind jumps around. Now that all the volunteers have returned home and the communities are now satisfied I have nothing to write... Now I will lecture for better or for worse, because it was just one of those kind of days:

I was sitting and waiting at the airport in the food court. Surrounded by the bright and inviting lights, the sweet and delicious smells, and of course the fried and unhealthy foods. I couldn't help but look at the people around me filling their mouths with the edible manifestation of the sights, smells and sounds. Eating fries, drinking coke, commenting on how hungry they were, never satisfied. It is a strange world we live in, it is not a natural world with everyone in a symbiotic relation with the earth, but a world of over consumption, with industrialized and unnatural products.

We are a society that thrives on marketing to the consumer anything that sells with little thought of the consumer's need or anything else for that matter. The bottom line drives. Now with our new Green Revolution in full swing, why would companies not use this gimmick to sell their products? Companies are driven to market (and of course sell) to us all the best energy star technologies that they deem we are required to buy, because in this Green Revolution, it is still all about buying. It is about consumers purchasing the best item and then replace it the following year with Version 2.0. This is the only way us, the consumer, can get even more savings year after year and thus help the environment more year after year. Forget about the environmental costs due to producing these items: mining for the materials, forging the material, transporting the item. All this needs to be ignored. The items have already been made, we need to focus on the immediate energy savings that buying the bigger fridge will save us (and the environment). It uses less energy than any other large fridge around and now that's an accomplishment. Of course smaller fridges use less... Not necessary. How about no fridge? Heaven forbid! These are not possibilities. In our Green Revolution, it is about buying more, the more we buy the happier we are and the happier the planet is, period. Our Green Revolution is not about what is logical and actually, gasp, reducing our consumption to save on energy costs around the globe.

With its faults, it would be unfair not the mention what is positive about our America and foremost is the freedom. Albeit some of these freedoms are hard to obtained because they are constrained by social control. All the social norms about consumption, body image and fashion to name a few make it harder for us, the obedient pack, to act outside of the self-loathing, self-gloating and self-satiation. We are never good enough in the eyes of others, so we compensate by continually telling and reminding people about how good we are, while always yearning to have more for ourselves to catch up to our neighbor. However, even with the ubiquitous norms, we are given the choice to write about what we think is wrong in the thoughts and actions of the world around us. We have the choice to sever the ties of consumption by living frugally and to giving our share to others. We have the choice to unplug from mainstream media and ignore the expensive dress code and accessories it requires from us and to instead live a simple more meaningful life. We all know that their will be obstacles to being an individual, to be the one who can step outside of the pack and to look at a social norms from the outside, objective view to see the illogical idiosyncracies that us humans in the obedient pack are conforming to. (Eating, drinking and smoking excessively, french friends, fancy cars, diamonds, red meat, and huge houses...) Its important to live the life we want and to think outside the framework that is provided by the norms. Choosing a lifestyle is akin to choosing a religion, how can we know which lifestyle we prefer if we know only one lifestyle and have not explored others.

Nonetheless, we have to be confident in our actions if they are led by compassion, we have to stand by our decisions to be nice to someone who has offended us. We need to be confident and drop our insecurities and realize that the person next to us has the same insecurities of inferiority as we do and lift these people up instead of putting them down. If we see arrogance, if we see pride, we need to see the mechanisms of defense these people are carefully constructing around themselves to enclose the true self that they are not comfortable sharing with others. We need to find their true selves and elevate them with kind words, not by fighting pride with more pride.

We can all do this, we can help someone around us and we will have changed the world for that one person. I hear many people talking about their grandiose goals to help others that are measured by numbers and figures and graphs and statistics. The person with the best numbers wins. Yet in the meantime, the people around them who are most important to them (or rather, who they are most important to) are treated poorly. This is a concrete change we can all make and instead of waiting for our ephemeral dreams that escape us further at the purchase of each new calendar and the building of new obstacles. We need to ensure those around us are happy and feel our positivity towards them now and not wait.

People selfishly say many times that they want to live for themselves right now before they change to live for others, but living for others is living for yourself. It is rewarding, meaningful, positive, fulfilling, etc. The yearning of wanting more is thwarted by these compassionant actions. So we need to ensure that those around us are happy before we go off and save the world for others far off. Let us all start with the world around us and change the world for our family, friends, acquaintences, strangers and everyone we encounter. That is saving the world little by little.

P.S. I saw a sloth crossing the road in a community. It was slow.