Yearly Archives: 2017

The promised drill rig to dig the much-needed well for Instituto Augusto Cesar Sandino is on its way to the port in Nicaragua! The non-profit Amigos for Christ that works in northern Nicaragua is providing the use of this drill, being shipped this month from Philadelphia and slated to arrive around Christmas. It’s a powerful machine adequate to the job of drilling for water through the blue rock at the new secondary school in La Carreta.

Somos Ohana Nicaragua will provide infrastructure, such as a pump and piping, for this well. We have worked and hoped for this access to water since the beginning of building this school. The students can look forward to adequate water for sanitation, hydration and the irrigation of their garden crops, and Somos Ohana Nicaragua can look forward to starting the construction of the third wing, which will include a kitchen.

Ultimately, the school plans to offer agricultural and animal husbandry skills in addition to the regular academic curriculum and computer classes which are ongoing now.

Agriculture is planned as the focus of the new secondary school, Instituto Augusto Cesar Sandino, in La Carreta. Therefore, we are very happy to receive word that the pipians (squash) planted in the summer have matured and been harvested by the students. The garden will potentially help feed lunch to the school’s kids as well as giving them experience growing food. Having 20 cordobas (roughly a 65 cents) to buy lunch at school is out of the question for many students and is one of the reasons some come only to Saturday school rather than attending Monday through Friday.

La Carreta students and Language Arts teacher Luvy Rueda lainez recently cooked up the school garden’s pipians for lunch, with rice.

The Gov’t gives the primary schools some rice and beans, and sometimes flour, sugar, and cooking oil. (Usually none of that goes to the secondary schools.) The mothers at the primary schools take turns cooking for the children’s lunches in a program to encourage school attendance.

In La Carreta, to encourage more students to attend daily classes, the Directora (Principal), with the permission of the Delegada, (head of the local Ministry of Education), procured some of the rice and beans from the primary school supply to feed the secondary students. Sometimes, they ran out of rice and beans, and received nothing. This is a special plan for La Carreta’s Instituto A. C. Sandino only. If it is successful, it may extend to other secondary schools.

When La Carreta’s Instituto has a real kitchen, which we are planning to provide in the 3rd wing, and more gardens, they can broaden their scope of how the kitchen will work. Besides a place to prepare lunches, it will also be a way of teaching the students how to prepare vegetables in a clean environment, with various seasonings, too.

The amazing “Attic Clean-Out,” remains-of-an-estate, fundraiser yard sale is Saturday, October 14, 8am to 1pm, where we’ll have unique antiques and collectibles as well as Nicaraguan crafts, plus household, baby and clothing items, plants, foods and more, at 51 Mano Drive in Kula Kai subdivision, Kula, Maui.

This yard sale is dedicated to raising funds for the 3rd wing of the Instituto Augusto Cesar Sandino secondary school at La Carreta, municipality of Villanueva, in Chinandega province.

In a rural area of NW Nicaragua where there had never been a secondary school before, after much planning by the community and several years of fund-raising by our non-profit organization, ground was broken for the first two wings of the one-story school in August 2015 and completed in February 2016 when 130 students began their first academic year there. The room marked “Computacion” with its 10 computers is a very popular hub of activity Monday through Saturday, with weekday students, Saturday students and teachers learning to use programs. Spanish language arts, English, mathematics, science and history classes are going on in the other classrooms.

This past summer during our team’s mission, during the days the deaf teens attended our day camp for special needs youth, they were taken to the new school’s computer room to begin to acquire much-needed keyboarding and computer use skills. Most of these students attend schools that cannot provide any computer classes.

The community being served by the school has requested agricultural and animal husbandry courses along with a standard secondary curriculum. Therefore, a third wing, in the planning and fund-raising stage, will include a kitchen to process the produce the students and teachers will raise in the market gardens.

Visit Somosohana Nicaragua on Facebook for photos of some of our unusual treasures!

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