Tag: Managua

Travel with mamawolfe: Cementing Friendships in Nicaragua

Posted on July 27, 2013 by Jennifer Wolfe

Cameron and Lily on the first day.

The first day in Nicaragua is often a blur. Between the red eye flight, the road travel from the airport to Managua, and then arrival at the Seeds of Learning Resource Center midday, it’s hard for me to tell the date or time. All I know is I’m feeling a strange blend of exhausion and adrenaline that helps me stay awake for nearly 36 hours.

Nicaragua’s landscape is amazingly green and tropical. The sky today is overcast and the scent of smoke hovers in the air as we load the Toyota truck and head off for the worksite. Twelve kids and seven adults, coated with sunscreen and loaded with backpacks and water bottles, took off down the dirt road for the first day of our adventure.

The back of the existing school, where our building begins.

The children and teachers greeted us in Casas Viejas. Currently, the community has a two room schoolhouse for preschool through 6^th grade. Our job is to help construct a two-room annex to provide a space for high school students. In Nicaragua, high school is grades 5-11. For the kids of Casas Viejas, the nearest high school is over several mountain passes, about a 90 minute walk. This addition will provide high school for not only kids, but also adults in the community.

Teacher Ana (left) and Ize, our host at SOL (right)

Yuri teaches 17 preschool students, Ana teaches 22 primary students in 1^st-3^rd grades, and Marisa teaches 22 4^th – 6^th graders. The teachers also serve as liaisons for the community to provide information about the school building project.

Nicaraguans are incredibly hospitable, and go to great lengths to make us feel welcome and comfortable in their community. As soon as we arrived, Carolina, a 6^th grader, quietly came up to me and waited for me to speak. She had a sweet smile, and was excited to get to know the teenage girls and me. After a prayer and singing the national anthem, she proudly danced for us.

Our work task for today was to prepare to start building one of three walls for the school. First, we had to create a human chain to move bricks from the front of the school to the back area where the annex is being built. It was a great way to get to know some of the kids, and we were able to move hundreds of bricks fairly quickly. Cameron managed to turn it into a game, while getting to make some new friends.

Cameron begins to build a foundation.

To the kids great delight, the wall building began a bit early! Lily took right to the bricklaying, while Cameron helped build a cement foundation.

This trip, I decided to be much more organized about getting to know the kids’ names, so I took a photo of these girls and asked them to write their names and ages in my notebook. I’d forgotten that photos are a huge treat in Nicaragua.

It snowballed, and soon I had nearly every child wanting to write in my notebook.

After a few hours of brick laying, we tumbled into the pickup and headed for home. We knew we’d sleep well, with the work of cementing friendships in Nicaragua has begun. The awkward introductions were over, and tomorrow the real building would begin.

Cameron covers his face from the dusty ride home.

How can you resist these smiles? Not bad payment for a long day of work!

Julito

Josselina

Jose Manuel

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

Nicaragua Packing Party

Posted on July 20, 2013 by Jennifer Wolfe

Today was our official ‘packing party’ for our trip to Ciudad Dario, Nicaragua. We leave tomorrow night! The receiving of the donations and packing of the supplies makes the trip seem so real…this is the exciting part for me!

Why a packing party? Well, as part of our trip, we collect donations of school supplies, books, office supplies, crafts, and other items that are usable to the schools built by Seeds of Learning. This year, in large thanks for the interview and article published in The Davis Enterprise, our community stepped up and donated so many supplies that they filled my car AND sixteen suitcases, duffel bags, bins and boxes.

I wasn’t sure if we would fit everything, but thanks to our expert packers (and soon to be school construction workers), they managed to get each box and bag tightly packed – and no container weighed more than the 35 lb. weight limit.

Let’s see… 35 lbs. each, times 16 boxes…thats 560 lbs of supplies! WOW!

I was astounded at the outpouring of support from our community, as well as cash donations from others living far away, that helped us gather such a huge amount of materials. Cameron packed dozens of brand new backpacks – the kids in Nicaragua will love having something new and all their own to take to school each day!

Linnea and I packed dozens of children’s books, all in Spanish. I got excited just reading the titles – I can’t wait to read them to the children in person! Many of these donations meant a lot to the owners, and we appreciate you giving up those parts of your children’s childhood to help the Nicaraguan kids with their education. I promise they will be well used and well loved for many years.

Tomorrow night, we fly out on a red eye flight from San Francisco, California to San Salvador, El Salvador – about 5 hours. After a short layover, we fly to Managua, Nicaragua-just under an hour of flying time. When we arrive in Managua we’ll be met by Seeds of Learning staff, and will drive nearly two hours to Ciudad Dario, where our adventure really begins.

Thanks so much to all the supporters of our 2013 trip…we couldn’t do this work without you. Think good thoughts for us, and stay tuned for updates from the work site and around Nicaragua. The nineteen of us, as well as the Seeds of Learning staff and the people of Nicaragua thank you.

Adios! ¡Hasta pronto!

Territorio soberano. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jennifer Wolfe

Injustice All Around Us: Seeds of Learning in Nicaragua

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Jennifer Wolfe

Victor helps to dig rocks to build his own school in Nicaragua

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

-Elie Weisel

Sadly, in 2013 we continue to see injustice all around us. Injustice happens when decisions are made by leaders, bullies, and those who think they know best. Injustice hides in boardrooms, workplaces, private homes, and government. Injustice isn’t just a product of wars and fighting between countries; injustice happens right outside your front door every day.

Elise Weisel lived through one of the most publicly horrific episodes of injustice in the modern world, but if we travel to many, many countries today we see the same oppression, the same powerlessness of the people, the same pain.

Too many people avert their eyes from injustice. It’s painful to watch, and even more painful to be immersed inside it when it’s all around us. But we don’t need to be cartoon crime fighters to chip away at the injustice all around us-we simply need to take one step forward.

To me, education is the great equalizer for injustice. As Americans learned from our times of slavery, education is power. Education cannot be taken away from us. Education leads to enlightenment. In America, educators and parents work hard to create and sustain an education system with equal access for all. In my career, equal access hasn’t meant an inability to learn in an actual building, with real desks, and basic supplies.

When I learned about Seeds of Learning in 2009, I felt that I had found a place where I could make a difference, a place to help right the injustice of a lack of education. Seeds of Learning is a non-profit group dedicated to improving education in central America, right now specifically in Nicaragua.

I’ve written before about the life-changing experience my children and I had when we traveled to Ciudad Dario, Nicaragua, in 2010. After years of listening to their pleas to return, we are organizing another trip to Ciudad Dario this summer to help build an addition to a high school, and to improve global citizenship between the two countries.

If you’d like to learn more about our trip and support Seeds of Learning, please click here to visit the link to our Indiegogo campaign:

Don’t let the bullies win. Decide where you want to speak out, help out, or work towards righting injustice. It doesn’t mean you need to travel all the way to Nicaragua, or take on something huge. It just takes a little step forward to make a big impact.

Jennifer Wolfe

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Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe