Changing your worldview by traveling around the world

Traveling across the world to see the plight of those in poverty can really change your perspective. People who come back often become more involved in social justice, by volunteering more, starting new charities and doing more advocacy.

From The Marietta Times, writer Kate York tells us how 20 year old Ellen Schott was changed by a trip to Nicaragua.

"I've always wanted to go abroad and do service work, but this is the first opportunity where I could without it interfering with classes or a job," Schott said. "Once I was there, I definitely saw a greater need and it made me realize everything we have here in our country."

Residents in the community of Papayal would wake up, listen to Latin music and start impromptu soccer games and be happy with those simple activities, Schott said.

But they also lived in areas with trash everywhere, sleeping under bug nets to prevent malaria and having latrines and bucket showers as bathrooms.

"They definitely live in poverty," Schott said. "They even fill the potholes there with trash because they have nowhere to put it."

The homes Schott and her friends built, along with masons from the organization Bridges to Communities, will help, but they're far smaller than the size to which most Americans are accustomed.

"The houses were really small with the entire families sleeping in one room," Schott said. "We couldn't get over that a family of six would be living in a house that's the size of one of our dorm rooms."

Overnight Links for December 10th

... or more like morning links due to our late start...

From Medecins Sans Frontieres a look at how cholera treatment is continuing on despite the political protests and unrest.


Reuters Alert Net introduces us to a new pneumonia vaccine that is about to begin distribution in Nicaragua.

The great website Wikileaks has gathered some evidence that China's aid to Africa does come with conditions. Jonathan Glennie of the Guardian examines the leaked US embassy cables.

Nicaragua's brain drain

Since alleged election fraud in 2008, aid coming into Nicaragua has been halted. The aid stoppage from the US and the EU coupled with the global recession has caused a crumbling economy.

Instead of trying to struggle within the nation's borders, young people migrate to other nations. Experts say this further causes a drag on the Nicaraguan economy as the youngest and most talented workers leave.

From the IPS, writer José Adán Silva explains why 60 percent of young Nicaraguans say they would leave if they could.

Between 1990 and 2005, more than 800,000 Nicaraguans left the country, and 400,000 more could migrate by 2010, according to the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report 2009, devoted this year to the topic of migration. But local projections put that figure even higher.

The report, "Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development", adds the caveat that its estimates for 2010 of migration for economic reasons are based on long-term trends, and may not exactly predict the effects of unexpected short-term fluctuations like the ongoing global economic crisis.

According to Bayardo Izabá, the head of the non-governmental Nicaraguan Human Rights Centre (CENIDH), the statistics in the UNDP report are an underestimate. Although the report was released this month, it is based on surveys carried out by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in 2007.

"Over one million people have left the country because of poverty," Ibaza told IPS. "No one leaves the country for any other reason, and there are another million or more young people who want to migrate."

CENIDH publishes an annual report on the general situation in Nicaragua, including the number of people who migrated and those who were deported back to the country.

The Human Development Report indicates that Nicaraguans living abroad represent 13 percent of the country's population, which was 5.5 million in 2007. Nicaragua is ranked 124th out of 182 countries in terms of its human development index, a measure of a country's success in providing citizens with a long, healthy life, education and decent living standards.

Nicaragua has the lowest human development index in Central America and the second lowest in Latin America after Haiti. The UNDP puts the poverty rate in Nicaragua at 48 percent, and extreme poverty at 17 percent.

The head of the non-governmental Permanent Commission on Human Rights, Marcos Carmona, told IPS that people migrate for two main reasons: chronic poverty that was aggravated by the 1979-1990 civil war, and government neglect because the administration's economic policies are focused on meeting financial obligations to multilateral lenders.

U. S. cuts aid to Nicaragua

The U. S. has stopped 60 million dollars of aid to Nicaragua. The U. S. government cut the aid because of concerns about democracy and free markets in the country.

From this Associated Press story that we found at Oregon Live, reporter Matthew Lee recieves an explanation from the government about the cuts in aid.

The board of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. taxpayer-funded operation set up by former President George W. Bush to fight poverty in developing nations, said Wednesday it had cut $62 million from a $175 million program for Nicaragua because of problems in recent elections.

"This decision is made with deep disappointment, as our partnership with Nicaragua has yielded tremendous progress over the past years in reducing poverty through innovative economic growth projects," said Rodney Bent, the corporation's chief executive.

The cut in aid follows a suspension in new U.S. assistance announced last November after municipal elections that the opposition said were marred by fraud. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a leader of the Sandinistas in the 1980s, declared the protests were unconstitutional.

In March, Ortega accused the U.S. of punishing the poor with the suspension and defended the local elections, in which his Sandinistas won a majority of mayorships, as fair. The opposition said the vote was fraudulent and complained that international observers were not allowed.

Bent said the MCC would only back countries whose "governments actively demonstrate a commitment to democracy and the rule of law, as well as economic freedom and social investment."

Nicaragua; the poorest country in the Americas

During the global recession as many as 52,000 jobs could be lost in Nicaragua. Already the poorest country in the Americas, many are saying the country will fall well short of meeting Millennium Development Goal number 1, halving poverty by 2015.

From the IPS story, José Adán Silva examines how the country is reeling from the global recession.

In late 2008 the president of the Central Bank, Antenor Rosales, forecast three percent GDP growth for 2009. In January he revised the estimate downward, to between one and two percent.

The non-governmental Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUNIDES) predicted in March that GDP would shrink by between 0.4 and 1.7 percent. It also estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 people would lose their jobs, and between 33,000 and 64,000 people would sink into poverty this year.

In this Central American country of 5.7 million, 47 percent of the populations live on less than two dollars a day, according to the United Nations.

This month the Central Bank confirmed a fall in exports in the first quarter of the year.

Rosales said exports from January to March were worth 355 million dollars, 11 percent below exports for the same period in 2008. "The hardest-hit product is coffee," he added.

The Nicaraguan economy is based on agriculture and livestock, and its main sources of revenue are exports of grains, meat and meat products, textile manufacturing, tourism, and remittances from workers living abroad.

According to the Nicaraguan Civil Society Network for Migrations, one million Nicaraguans are working outside the country, and they send home between 750 million and 850 million dollars a year.

Exports from duty free zones make up 37 percent of total exports in Nicaragua. In the first quarter of 2009 they brought in 243 million dollars, 15 percent less than in the same period last year.

Textile factories in the free zones are among those hit hardest by the crisis. Two companies closed down in May, bringing to 131 the number of firms that have gone under since 2007. A further four may close their doors in the coming months.

A much needed new Wastewater treatment plant in Nicaragua

For over 80 years, waste has been dumped into Nicaragua's Lake Managua. The lake has been described by environmentalists as the "World's Largest Toilet." Further, over 80 percent on Nicaragua's water is polluted.

Even as far back as 1969, the Nicaraguan government declared neighborhoods around the Lake Managua uninhabitable. Only now does the area have it's own waste water treatment plant.

From the IPS, José Adán Silva tells us about Nicaragua's big step in fulfilling the neglected Millennium Development Goal.

Ruth Selma Herrera, president of the Empresa Nicaragüense de Acueductos y Alcantarillados - Nicaragua’s water and sewage utility - said the new plant is processing 132,000 cubic metres of wastewater a day, and will process 180,000 cubic metres a day when it reaches full operating capacity.

The wastewater from 60 chemical companies and Managua’s 1.2 million people has been dumped untreated into the lake from 17 drains since 1927, when the government ordered all sewage to be channeled into the lake until a new sewer system was built.

But the system was not in place until 2007, when 32 kilometres of underground drainage and sewage pipes running to the treatment plant were completed.

"It is an old dream of the Nicaraguan people to salvage the beautiful gifts that God gave this land of lakes and volcanoes and, thanks to God, the government and friendly countries, we are giving a start to that dream," Herrera remarked to IPS.

Work on the plant began in 1997, with funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the governments of Germany and other European countries, and the Nicaraguan treasury. The total cost was 85.5 billion dollars.

More than 120,000 users of the sewage system are now connected to the treatment plant, which will begin to ease pollution of the 1,040 square kilometre lake which is located in western Nicaragua, near the Pacific coast.

The Wales Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign

A news story in the UK's Evening Leader taught us about a group from Wales who organize fundraisers to help people in Nicaragua. The group is called the Wales Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign. Led by David McKnight, the group is about to take another trip to Nicaragua to help families that were hurt by Hurricane Felix.

The group operates a blog on Word Press. The Evening Leader's story tells us what the group hopes to do on their latest trip.

It will be the 32-year-old's fourth trip to Central America's poorest country, which he has visited every two years since 2001 as a member of the Wales Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, which was founded 20 years ago to help struggling families, promote fair trade and create links between the two countries.

David, of Mynydd Isa, and six other campaign members from across Wales will leave on their latest trip on Valentine's Day and will visit Los Quinchos Centre, which works with children who live and work on the huge la Chureca rubbish dump in the capital city of Managua, and who have no choice but to scavenge in order to survive.

The group will also travel to Bilwi on the Caribbean coast, which suffered huge amounts of damage when Hurricane Felix struck the region a year ago. The hurricane killed hundreds of people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes, including entire villages.

David said: "One of the reasons why we are travelling to Bilwi is to see if there is any support we can provide, to help with the long term reconstruction of the area."

Before returning home to begin raising money for those in desperate need of help, the group will stay on a Fairtrade coffee farm in Matagalpa, in the mountains in Nicaragua.

David said: "The campaign has promoted Fairtrade coffee and sesame from Nicaragua for over a decade.

One Million Nicaraguans emigrate to Costa Rica

Trying to escape poverty and a lack of jods in Nicaragua, over a million people have emigrated to Costa Rica to find a job. The numbers are according to the International Organization for Migration. Around 250,000 people from Nicaragua now live in Costa Rica permanently. Many return to their home country after their temporary job ends.

We found the story on the emigration from the Costa Rica's Daily News

With a population of 5.6 million inhabitants - more than half of them under 18 - with an annual growth of 2.7 percent, Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas, "is facing a tremendous challenge to overcome its poverty," IOM spokesman Jean-Philippe Chauzy said Friday in Geneva.

That challenge, he said, particularly affects women, since a quarter of Nicaraguan households are headed by women.

The spokesman cited Capt. Lenin Flores, head of a busy post on the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border, who said that the Nicaraguan emigrants "are not criminals," but people "risking everything to find work and a better life," even though they do it without the required documents.

Chauzy also pointed to the case of 18-year-old Juanita, who traveled a long, hard road to cross the border illegally with her husband and children, and said that "wages are low and we have two kids, we just can't manage that way."

In the last 30 years, Nicaraguan emigration has been spurred by natural disasters, political conflicts and economic hardship.

Costa Rica, meanwhile, has become a magnet for people without professional qualifications thanks to the abundant job market in sectors less attractive to the native population - above all in agriculture, construction and domestic service.

A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall

from IPS News

By José Adán Silva

MANAGUA, Having been hit by three hurricanes and 25 tropical storms in less than 10 years, Nicaragua is looking ahead to the next rainy season, due to begin in May, with wariness and trepidation.

The government is alarmed by forecasts of an active cyclone season ahead.

Colorado State University in the United States has forecast that during the North Atlantic hurricane season from June to November this year, there will probably be 15 named tropical storms, eight of which will become hurricanes. Four of these will be capable of inflicting severe damage, they predict.

Nicaragua’s Civil Defence chief, Colonel Mario Pérez-Cassar, told IPS he is taking this forecast seriously, because over the years the university’s predictions have been "98 percent accurate."

"Every year we assess the different scenarios and analyse climate conditions using national and international instruments," he said. Forecasts by Dr. William Gray, a Colorado State University meteorologist with 25 years’ experience of predicting hurricanes, "are always accurate, so this year we are preparing for the worst."

Pérez-Cassar said the army is drawing up evacuation and shelter plans for at least half a million Nicaraguans living in 996 areas that are extremely vulnerable to storms and flooding.

He estimates a 50 percent chance that Nicaragua will be lashed by another hurricane like Felix, a Category 5 storm that destroyed a large part of the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) in the northeast of the country last year. Category 5 is the highest level of hurricane intensity on the Saffir-Sampson scale.

Hurricane Felix devastated the RAAN on Sept. 4, 2007, killing 102 people, with another 130 people missing and 220,000 left homeless. Damages were assessed at 900 million dollars, and crops in the region were totally destroyed, according to official data. Earlier, in 1998 and 2005 respectively, hurricanes Mitch and Beta pounded Nicaragua, causing over 3,000 deaths and billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure and to the country’s productive capacity.

Civil Defence statistics show that since 1998, Nicaragua has also been directly affected by 25 tropical storms that caused floods, landslides and severe crop damage.

President Daniel Ortega has even proposed suspending municipal elections in the RAAN, on the grounds that it is highly probable that a string of storms and hurricanes is heading that way.

Indigenous communities in the RAAN are still suffering the after-effects of hurricane Felix and the forecasts for this year have magnified fears of another disaster to come, said Reverend Norman Bent, a pastor in Puerto Cabezas, which was badly hit by the hurricane in 2007.

"The coastal areas of Puerto Cabezas, both to the north and to the south, were severely damaged and houses have still not been rebuilt. They are almost exactly as they were just after the hurricane; very few homes have been rebuilt," he said.

"There isn’t famine as such, but there is a shortage of certain staple foods. People are not eating as they should. It’s already time to plant rice and other basic products such as cassava, bananas and plantains, but people are reluctant. They’re afraid another hurricane will come and take everything away from them again," Bent said.

The Nicaraguan Institute of Territorial Studies (INETER) has also predicted a turbulent rainy season. "Given the variation in temperatures of the continental platform in the Atlantic off Nicaragua because of the effects of global warming, the conditions are such that any tropical storm in that area will gather strength and become a hurricane," it warned.

Following the announcement of more heavy rainfall to come, the mayor’s office in Managua is taking urgent measures to clear water channels and eliminate refuse dumps.

Modesto Rojas, in charge of Environment for the city council, told IPS that the mayor’s office is working "at full steam" to clean the water channels, which are clogged with rubbish after refuse collectors went on a month-long strike.

The mayor’s office has also called on the national government to protect the international airport and the city centre of Managua. Deforestation and erosion on the mountains surrounding the capital have increased the risk of mudslides.

"Over one million Managuans are vulnerable to landslides from the mountains that form the southern watershed for rivers draining into Lake Managua. This is not alarmist, it’s a fact, and the government must heed the warnings," Rojas said. According to conservationist and scientist Jaime Incer, "today more than ever before, the country is destroyed and exposed to natural disasters, not only because of local environmental destruction but also due to the effects of climate change."

"In the last 40 years, we have done everything possible to make ourselves naked and defenceless against disasters," he complained, referring to the destruction of 60 percent of forest biomass in recent years, and the pollution of 80 percent of Nicaragua’s water sources.

Claudio Tomasi, deputy resident representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Nicaragua, said that climate change can already be seen in extreme phenomena such as hurricanes, tidal waves, extensive flooding and lengthy droughts.

Natural disasters are an increasing concern all over the world, since they limit the ability of countries to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to improve their human development index ranking, Tomasi said.

However, the executive secretary of the National System for Disaster Prevention, Mitigation and Response, Ramón Arnesto, said that although there are real risks, there is also a great deal of sensationalism in press coverage of the issue.

Houses Without Water or Water Without Houses?

from Inside Costa Rica

By José Adán Silva

MANAGUA - Authorities in Nicaragua are facing the dilemma of generating thousands of jobs through the development of the construction and real estate industry in the capital or putting a priority on future water supplies for the city’s 1.2 million people.

The debate broke out in February, when five city governments in Managua and surrounding suburbs agreed to adopt a ban on the construction of housing units to the south of the city, a rural, forested area where the underground water reserves that supply the capital are located.

Managua Mayor Dionisio Marenco, the main sponsor of the ban, told IPS that for 17 years, development companies have been clearing the forests in that area and building housing projects with little government oversight.

"In the name of free enterprise and progress, they have hurt the city’s water resources and the country," said the mayor. "In that area, they have destroyed forests without any controls, levelled the land, made sources of water disappear and polluted the water reserves that are going to supply the city for the next 30 years."

The mayor complained that the companies have not respected building regulations, have dumped construction industry debris and sewage, which leak into the underground water reserves, and have ignored safety measures in sewage treatment plants.

The declaration of a development ban had the support of the town councils in El Crucero, La Concepción, Managua, Nindirí and Ticuantepe, and of the president’s office, the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARENA) and the state-run water and sewage company (ENACAL).

ENACAL president Ruth Selma Herrera reported that 355 urban developments are under construction in the area encompassed by the building ban, which have reportedly not presented the water treatment infrastructure feasibility studies that must be approved before construction begins.

She also said the companies use the water without paying for the connections or the service, even though the country’s legislation establishes that water supplies belong to the state and are subject to oversight by the relevant government agencies.

"They do business without paying, without making rational use of the water, while polluting it and refusing to bring their construction projects to a halt," Herrera told IPS.

Because of the deforestation, chaotic urban growth around the capital, and lack of investment in the city’s sewage and water systems over the last 17 years, "there are areas in Managua where we can't pump water and we have to ration it up to 12 hours a day, while the companies pollute and exhaust the water supplies day after day," said Herrera.

The decision by the environmental and municipal authorities drew an angry reaction from the Chamber of the Construction Industry and the real estate industry.

Alfonso Silva, president of the Chamber of Real Estate Developers, said the industry, which invests around 200 million dollars a year, generates employment for 25,000 heads of households and reduces the pressing housing shortage in the country.

"Nicaragua has an over 30 percent unemployment rate and a deficit of more than 500,000 housing units. In these conditions of extreme poverty, we cannot be hindering development and hurting the economy," Silva told IPS.

Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. According to a January 2007 United Nations report, 47 percent of the population was living in poverty and 15 percent in extreme poverty.

"We are aware that the country must protect its natural resources, but it must do so without affecting investment and development. If a company fails to live up to the rules of the game, it should be punished, but we should not all be punished," argued Silva.

Lawmaker Agustín Jarquín Anaya, an ally of the leftist governing Sandinista Front, told IPS that the ban on housing construction in the area in question is "healthy and commendable," but said alternatives for the private investment projects affected by the measure should be explored.

"We should not be so drastic. Alternative solutions that seek to preserve water sources and that do not affect the country’s economic growth should be sought," he added.

Cirilo Otero, president of the Centre for Research on Environmental Policy, said the problem is complex because of the high levels of poverty in the country.

"On one hand Nicaragua has assumed the environmental commitments included in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but on the other, it has to respond to the people’s need for jobs," he said.

Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2000, the eight MDGs, which set a 2015 target date, are to halve extreme poverty and hunger from 1990 levels, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and maternal health, reduce child mortality, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development.

To meet the MDGs, Nicaragua will have to provide clean water and sanitation to 2.5 million people by 2015.

But little progress has been made towards that MDG. A report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), presented in Managua last year, stated that 70 percent of Nicaraguans lack access to clean water.

Víctor Campos, an expert in water resources at the Humboldt Centre, a local environmental organisation, said Nicaragua’s water supply problems are not caused by actual shortages.

For some in Managua, home is a garbage dump

from the San Antonio News Express

By Bonnie Kavoussi
Special to the Express-News

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — Near the historical center of this country's capital city, along the lake, lies a giant garbage dump. Although many people burn their trash outside their homes, this is where the rest of the garbage of Managua ends up. It is such a large dump that the locals have a name for it — La Chureca.

Piles of tires, cardboard, bags, paper, torn clothes and dead animals stretch for miles beyond sight. Then, an abandoned boy rises from the muck. Naked and covered in dirt, he wanders through the leftovers of a city larger than San Antonio. That is when one realizes — this trash dump is what he and some 2,000 others call home.

During my two-week stay last June with my friend Renata Barreto and her family, I was struck by how widespread the poverty was. Every time Renata's family would drive me around, I'd glimpse the faces of the poor and wonder about their life stories. Even as I grew more thankful for the comfortable estate where I was staying, I became determined to experience Nicaragua on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

So, one Saturday, I decided to explore the streets of Managua in the same way that Express-News reporter Vince Davis drives the streets of San Antonio every Wednesday, looking for a story. Since I had the fortune of shadowing Davis as an Express-News intern on a few of his reporting trips, I knew the basics about how to find a story and interview people.

Renata's aunt, Karla Grace Montenegro del Carmen, gave me the name of a trustworthy taxi driver who drove me around the streets of Managua for 21/2 hours. He was an excellent judge of which places were safe to stop at and which weren't.

Before the trip, Renata's grandmother, Gloria Montalvan, had asked, "Which parts of Managua do you want to see?"

"The poorest parts," I said immediately.

"Then you should go to La Chureca."

Remembering that suggestion, I asked the taxi driver to take me to the trash dump.

Our arrival must have been a sight to behold — a cab slowly driving through mountains of debris as hundreds of people paused from picking through the trash to stare up at us.

Throughout La Chureca, clusters of shacks dot the landscape. They're made of cardboard, plastic, plywood, metal, mattresses — all material dug up from the piles of trash surrounding them.

In one complex live 15 family members. They have made these few shacks, each spanning several square yards. The family has lived in La Chureca for 20 years.

The first question that might come to mind is why any human being would willingly live in such conditions. Reyna Isabel Arbizu, 49, explains, "We moved here because we didn't have work. We don't have to pay anything to live here."

Santo Ramón Aguirre Ríos, 42, the taxi driver who drove me to La Chureca, says that they have access to everything they need to survive right there.

In a perverse sort of way, Ríos is right. A hose next to this family's shacks provides water to bathe in and to drink. In the piles of trash surrounding them, there are leftover clothes to wear, leftover food to eat. But is it possible to maintain one's dignity while living off everyone else's leftovers?

Celia Gutierrez Arbizu, 19, says that the adults in her family work in La Chureca from 6 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, seven days a week. Their mission: to find recyclables in the trash heaps and sell them to a nearby facility. This work is the only gainful activity available to most residents here.

"When we don't work, we don't eat," says Celia.

At the end of the week, according to Celia, they earn only 50 córdobas — far less than $3.

The family has hardly any clothes. Reyna, using an old sewing machine, has sewn together the few articles they do have from torn-away cloth.

Stray chickens wander around the shacks, as they do around all of Managua. These chickens will hopefully provide food for them — the freshest that they can find. Otherwise, they dig through the trash for food and smell it to see whether it is good or bad to eat.

It is a gross understatement when Celia says it's boring to live in La Chureca. There's no protection from disease, let alone any form of entertainment. They walk around barefoot as pieces of glass dot the ground.

There is a doctor in La Chureca, but he charges too much money for the family to afford. Manuel Villareyna, 5, is currently suffering from pneumonia. Elias Villareyna, 5 months old, already has a severe rash along his neck and buttocks and sobs from pain. No one in the family knows what has caused Elias' rash.

Their only hope for health is not in medicine or a health-care system, but in God. Andre Gutierrez Arbizu, 27, prays, "By the grace of God, we won't get sick."

On a wall outside the main shack hangs a campaign poster of Daniel Ortega, the socialist president of Nicaragua. It claims in bold letters in Spanish, "United, Nicaragua triumphs! Reconciliation, peace, work, well-being!"

The people here are the poorest of the poor. Everywhere in Managua — even in the suburbs — there is poverty, but nothing like La Chureca. Here, human beings are reduced to eating the same food as stray dogs. It is as if society has discarded not only unwanted things in this dump, but also unwanted people.

Nonetheless, there is still a glimmer of hope in this trash heap. That hope is education. All the children in the family attend the Colegio Cristiano de Esperanza — the Christian School of Hope — for free. The children speak positively about the quality of teaching there. They all wish to attend college someday.

Manuel Villareyna, 5, hopes to become a doctor when he grows up. His mom, Celia, smiles and says, "He wants to be able to cure me when I get sick."

Even though they wear trash, eat trash, and live in trash, the children refuse to believe that they are trash.

Victoria Villareyna, 6, giggles when a photo is taken of her and shouts, "Take another one."

Gazing into the camera, she hugs her siblings tightly, determined to show that even though her family does not have much, they still have plenty of love.

Bonnie Kavoussi, kavoussi@fas. Harvard.edu, is a former member of the San Antonio Express-News Teen Team. She's currently a freshman at Harvard University.

Farmers face dire poverty

from the Daily Targum

Nasreen Hussain / Correspondent

Being low on money is a common scenario for the average college student, but the lack of extra spending cash pales in comparison when viewed from a global perspective.

More than 1.5 million Nicaraguans face hunger and poverty, said Elvin Castellon Alvarado, a Nicaraguan farmer who spoke at the Second Reformed Church on the College Avenue campus Wednesday.

Of those 1.5 million, 47 percent are living in extreme poverty, which is an entire family living on 70 cents a day. The remaining 53 percent live on about $2 a day, he said.

More than 30 students, faculty members and members of the public gathered to hear Alvarado speak about reforestation, sustainable agriculture, food sovereignty and fair trade.

"[Alvarado's] topic is important because food security and food sovereignty affect every living person on this planet," said Tejas Kadia, an Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy sophomore. "Everybody has the right to food by virtue of being born, but over 850 million people are malnourished."

In the 1960s, more than 80 percent of land was taken for the use of cotton. Now no other crops can be grown because, the soil, once fertile, is now sterile, Alvarado said.

By 1970, Alvarado said, 30 percent of Nicaraguan forests were destroyed. Alvarado described this as a massacre.

Because of these changes, as well as numerous others, Nicaraguans are facing major problems with food production.

Livingston College senior Michael Magarelli said he came to the lecture because he is interested in social justice and wanted to learn about projects being done to help the local poor in Nicaragua.

Alvarado, the director of the Federation for the Development of Peasant Farmers based in Nicaragua, and other members of the organization are doing numerous things to help the Nicaraguan public.

Alvarado said from 2003 to 2004, FEDICAMP helped to plant 1.2 million trees to help with reforestation.

The organization also helps build more efficient kitchens for Nicaraguan families.

The traditional Nicaraguan kitchen is a large, open hearth that burns firewood. Because of the constant smoke and ash produced from these hearths, many women and children suffer from respiratory problems. Alvarado said the newer kitchens are more energy efficient, healthier and cheaper to maintain than the traditional kitchen.

One other thing FEDICAMP did was to set up large wells in which rainwater falls so the women do not have to go far to get water to wash and clean.

Alvarado said during these various projects FEDICAMP brings the resources and tools and the local community brings the manpower.

He stressed FEDICAMP is meant to help within communities for those communities so, as a result, many times the community themselves help with projects.

Students said they were moved by the extent of the community involvement.

"Here we have some of the poorest people in the world practicing sustainable agriculture while the people in the U.S. expect it to come about by some giant corporation," Mangarelli said.

Although these issues are important to the people of Nicaragua, the United States needs to also realize their role as part of the problem, Kadia said.

"If we are interested in truly tackling poverty, we must change our ways with subsidies, or acknowledge that our free trade agreements are unfair," she said. "Driving small-scale farmers off the land in other countries reduces that country's food sovereignty."

At the end of the lecture and a short question and answer session, a slideshow showed the natural and man-made beauty of Nicaragua, as well as the people of the country.

The lecture was conducted in Spanish but interpreted by Damian Suarez, a first-year graduate student in the Spanish department.

Jim Burchell of PeaceWorks, one of the organizations that helped organize the event, created the slideshow and encouraged members of the audience to visit Nicaragua.

"If you ever have the opportunity to go to Nicaragua or another country, [go] - for me, I've been going for a while and every time I go it's like my first time. It's incredible. I'm like a little boy in the back of a pick-up truck," said Burchell. "I've met so many people and it changes your life."

Burchell spoke with Rev. Barbara Heck, of the Protestant Campus Ministry, and Rev. John Larson, of the Lutheran Campus Ministry about a month ago and they viewed his slideshow.

"[Burchell] is, in my eyes, a prophet crying out and giving voice to the poor in a strange and foreign land," Heck said. "We were just moved by [the slideshow] and we began to think about how we could get the word out about Nicaragua to the Rutgers community."

Seattle group helping the poor buy land in Nicaragua

The Seattle Post Intelligencer

280-acre 'El Eden' supports 29 families

By TOM PAULSON

EDITOR'S NOTE: For decades, Seattle and the Northwest have had connections with Nicaragua in health care, economic development and political activism. During the civil war in the 1980s, many in Seattle and the Northwest became involved in the Sandinista-Contra struggle.

Some assistance projects and relationships created by those turbulent times have persisted. Meanwhile, newer bridges between the Northwest and Nicaragua are being built.

The Seattle P-I recently visited a handful of projects that represent the Northwest's continuing connection to the poorest nation in Central America.

NEAR MATAGALPA, Nicaragua -- The inequitable ownership of land has been at the root of many of Nicaragua's conflicts. Today, a little-known organization started by a Seattle attorney and community activist is working to reduce this inequity by helping the poorest of the poor buy land in these lush green hills.

"We are planting maracuya (passion fruit) as part of our plan to diversify crops," said farmer Leandro Hernandez, speaking with obvious pride while walking across a few acres of land to which he and his campesino family one day hope to hold title.

The land, for now, is owned by a Seattle non-profit organization called Agros International. Created in 1982 by Chi-Dooh "Skip" Li, a Seattle attorney, Agros bought this land for $170,000 and is selling it back to poor families who agree to make it productive.

Across the field, higher up on a hillside, Hernandez pointed to rows of tomato and jalapeno plants, as well as to the water tank they had built for irrigation. Elsewhere in this new 280-acre community, dubbed El Eden, that he and 29 other poor families recently have settled are crops of corn, avocado, beans, plantains, watermelon and coffee, some of which is headed for Camano Island Coffee Roasters.

"We will wait until the rains come, in May, to plant some of them," Hernandez said, explaining that the idea is to always have some produce to sell in the market, no matter what the season.

This is the first piece of land he -- or anyone in his family -- has ever owned and he is determined to make it a success.

"Before this, I had to rent a place for my family to live and work at a factory (farm) where I was paid 50 cordobas (less than $3) a day," he said.

With this land from Agros, he said, he makes only a little bit more money every day selling his produce. But he doesn't have to pay rent or buy food, so he is able to save money.

"I can send my children to school now," Hernandez said.

He and the other families in El Eden farm and live off the land as a sort of loan from Agros. Each family is required to pay Agros an average of $300 every year toward the purchase of the land. In less than a decade, if all goes well, the land will be theirs.

"We want to show them that they can take care of themselves and make progress on their own initiative, rather than to expect charity," said Kira Lopez, a financial manager at the Agros office in Managua.

"We have been working with this community for about 16 months," said Mario Gaitan, an agronomist and executive director of the Agros programs in Nicaragua. Gaitan and his colleagues help the farmers develop a master agricultural plan aimed at making the best use of the soil, water resources and local market demand.

"Before the Sandinistas, all the land in Nicaragua was owned by the big producers," Gaitan said.

After the revolution toppled the dictator Anastasio Somoza (who alone owned a huge chunk of the country), Gaitan said, the Sandinistas seized much of the land to redistribute it among the people. They formed farming collectives, but didn't give individuals ownership of land. There wasn't much done with legal title transfer. Many of the poor who received the land weren't trained sufficiently to take over the large farms.

The Sandinista plan largely imploded, leading to decay in the agricultural sector and increasing poverty. When conservatives regained power in 1990, their solution was to return the land to big landowners -- which threw even more peasants deeper into poverty.

"Land reform was failing," Li said.

When a friend and classmate from the University of Washington law school was killed in an El Salvador hotel while volunteering to work on land reform there, Li felt prompted to take up the cause.

"I didn't want to get involved in the politics, but I wanted to do something," said Li, who occasionally writes as a community columnist for the Seattle P-I editorial page.

After a visiting minister from Argentina spoke at his church suggesting individuals could buy land directly and give it to the poor, he started Agros to do that. Though its impetus was faith-based, Agros has no religious litmus test for deciding which families to help.

"We started in Guatemala and moved into Nicaragua in the mid-1990s," Li said.

The organization has grown very quietly, he said, into a sizable operation that is expected to reach $4 million in income by June with 30 sponsored communities throughout Latin America.

Some of the coffee beans grown by Hernandez and his neighbors in this mountain village are already showing up in Seattle cups.

"I really like what Agros is doing," said Jeff Ericson, owner of Camano Island Coffee Roasters. The company, which sells organic, shade-grown, freely traded beans, buys them from Agros-sponsored farmers in Nicaragua.

"This is not your typical charity at the trough," Ericson said. "This is about creating sustainable businesses and communities."

After examining Hernandez' jalapeno crop and some coffee plants that had recently been whacked by a tornado, Gaitan wandered back down into the center of the village. Workers were struggling to irrigate a field of young plantains effectively as the water flowed too fast here, backed up there or headed in the wrong direction.

Gaitan grabbed a hoe, began digging and deftly demonstrated how a different configuration of the ditch path allowed for better, more efficient flow. He handed back the hoe and the men went to work.

"We can help here and there," Gaitan said. "But it will be up to them for it to succeed."

TOMORROW

Efforts in Nicaragua to deal with a potentially deadly illness that overwhelms the poor country's health care system are largely the result of action by Seattle-based PATH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
LEARN MORE

agros.org: How to donate, how to get your group involved with a village, how you can work with a family and how you can help buy land and build housing.

globalpartnerships.org: Upcoming trips, how to donate, how to get news, how to get involved.

P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattlepi.com.

Mission views degrees of poverty

from The Plattsburgh Press Republican

North Country volunteers in Nicaragua horrified by 'surreal scene of living hell'

By: Suzanne Moore

PLATTSBURGH — Amid piles of smoking, putrid garbage, a 2-year-old girl squatted by herself in the mud, eating out of the trash.

"I just burst into tears," said Florence Reynaud, who spotted the child from a North Country Mission of Hope bus rolling out of the Managua city dump.

"I thought I had seen a lot in my life," the Plattsburgh woman said via cell phone. "But (the dump) was a surreal scene of living hell.

"We came back with big questions — how is this possible, how is this accepted?"

There are degrees of poverty, first-time mission helpers at the dump's clinic and soup kitchen learned in Nicaragua this week.

"I've never seen people this poor before on any mission I've been on," said Matt Jennings, a veteran of four Nicaragua trips and a Peru High School senior.

The people Mission of Hope helps at its home base in Chiquilistagua — "they're clean," he said. "These people are so dirty. They have the stomach that sticks out with parasites ..."

"It's so smoky here my eyes are burning," said Marilyn Knutson of Plattsburgh, who normally oversees the kitchen in Chiquilistagua during the February trip but on Thursday dished out rice, noodles and bread to dump dwellers.

"Everything everybody has on has come from the dump," she said.

So do the cups and bowls they hold up for the free food.

"One little boy didn't have anything, so we gave him the end of the bread bag for his plate," Knutson said.

The soup kitchen, held under a pavilion with cement benches, operates daily for about a half-hour at a time and has been run by a local church and its pastor for about a decade.

"I take my hat off to them," Knutson said, almost in awe.

Behind the pavilion, a chicken pecked through a mound of garbage; at one side sits a rude shelter draped in plastic that Knutson said a family calls home. A rusty barrel nearby held rainwater collected for washing and, maybe, she speculated, drinking.

"I wouldn't want anything that's been through all this smoke," she said.

By contrast, the families visited Thursday by Mission of Hope's outreach program live in relative comfort.

At least there were homes with sturdier walls of cinder block, said Reynaud, even a few with electricity.

And a clean breeze cooled the small room where nurse practitioner Cathy Hill of Cadyville and her team evaluated a woman named Benigna, who wore a bandage around her right hand.

"She thinks she's about 75 — she doesn't remember," said Sarah LeFloch, campus minister at Santa Fe High School in Lakeland, Fla., who's taking part with her husband, Evan, and two students.

Benigna's daughter and seven children share the small house with her, where on Thursday a chicken roamed the cement floor and a washboard told of the labor that produced the clean laundry fluttering outside on the line.

Inside hang photographs of Benigna's grandchildren who've graduated from high school, wearing caps and gowns; a statue of Jesus holds a place of honor.

It had been a year since the woman had seen a doctor, she told Hill through translator Ilona Flores of Plattsburgh.

Along with a strained wrist, she had asthma, malnutrition and fatigue, determined the nurse practitioner, urging her to visit the Mission of Hope clinic the next day for medication.

At another home, nurse Nicky Lundy cleaned an open wound on the arm of a 94-year-old man who suffers from congestive heart failure. Another elderly man was housebound by partial paralysis.

Heart disease, stroke and diabetes were among the ills Dr. Clark Knutson saw during his round of outreach, their unchecked symptoms an indicator of another kind of poverty.

"It's the same stuff we might have at home," said the Plattsburgh pediatrician and Marilyn's husband. "The problems here are getting the right medicines and getting the right care in an appropriate time."

Whether in the dump or on the hills above Chiquilistagua, the people accept their lives with grace and dignity, observed one missionary after another.

"I don't think it's really right to feel ashamed for these people because they don't feel ashamed," said Eliza Anderson, a second-time missionary and Plattsburgh High School student.

"The children are so full of life and happy just from living," said Rachel Luscombe, 17, and a junior at PHS, who charted living conditions during the outreach project.

"And the adults are proud and happy, also.

"It's amazing how happy they are when they have so little."

Nicaraguan leader seeks church support over IMF on anti-poverty action

from Ekklesia

Nicaraguan President-elect Daniel Ortega has announced that he will this week call on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to relax its stringent policy towards Nicaragua in order to be able to tackle endemic poverty and hunger.

The Sandinista leader, who will return to power in January 2007 after sixteen years out of office, hopes he can count upon support from the churches, non-government organisations and international solidarity networks as his centre-left administration tries to reverse years of decline which have left the Central American country among the most impoverished in the world.

Already, a former conservative Catholic Cardinal has made a strong public plea to make anti-poverty action a top priority.

Ortega, whose FSLN was a romantic cause celebre for the political left in the 1980s, lost the Nicaraguan election in 1990, after concerted US-backed attempts to destabilise the radical social experiment that followed years of Somoza dictatorship – which was ended by the Sandinista revolution in 1979.

Now, however, the former commandante has returned to power on a wave of renewed support, and he says that that he will try to work with private companies and foreign investors to rebuild the country.

Daniel Ortega is to meet with an IMF top level mission on Tuesday 19 December 2006, gathering in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua.

He said this week that maintaining macroeconomic balance and ending the dire poverty that affects 80 percent the population were the inter-dependent conditions for effectively renewing the IMF accord.

The IMF mission will be led by Western Division Manager Anoop Singh, IMF representative in Nicaragua, Humberto Arbulu, told reporters last week.

Among IMF demands are the freezing the Social Security Law the National Assembly approved May 2005, to be enforced when Ortega assumes office on 10 January 2007.

The president-elect says that abandoning such programmes means abandoning the neediest. He has also called on business leaders to back urgently needed social programmes.

The incoming Sandinista president has already received backing from unexpected sources. The now-retired Cardinal Obando y Bravo, who was a critic of the FSLN and the radical ‘popular church’ in the 1980s, recently spoke at a Mass to celebrate Ortega’s 61st birthday.

The 80-year-old retired archbishop of Managua mentioned in his homily what he considers one of the greatest injustices in the contemporary world: “It is relatively a few who possess much and many who possess almost nothing. It is injustice resulting from the poor distribution of goods and services destined originally for all.”

He continued: “Human rights are violated not only by terrorism, repression and murders but also by the existence of conditions of extreme poverty and of unjust economic structures that cause great inequalities.”

US Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon has also met with Daniel Ortega, and the US is now talking of an "important" new dialogue between the former bitter enemies.