Highlight: Chureca - Nica HOPE

Manna Project is proud to have built and to continue strong relationships with other non-profits active in La Chureca. These partnerships increase MPI's awareness of needs in the community and allow us to refer community members and interest to the appropriate organization. Love Light & Melody once again gives a view of life in Chureca and area NGOs with a number of videos highlighting the activities of a few of those organizations. The following video highlights Nica HOPE, an organization founded by former Manna Program Director Deanna Ford, which supports education and runs vocational training initiatives for women and children living in La Chureca.

Nica HOPE from Love Light & Melody on Vimeo.

For further information on Nica HOPE visit www.nicahope.org

Community Home Stays, Part I

Though the manna house is a valuable asset, living apart from Cedro Galan does prevent the Program Directors from fully understanding daily life in the community. In an attempt to further enlighten our team regarding the intricacies of life in Cedro, each of the ten PDs will, this week or next, live as those we are here to serve. The purposes of these community home stays are as follows:

1. To provide a cultural experience for the PDs, increasing their knowledge and understanding of life in the community.
2. To further understand the assets and needs of the community in order to better serve them.
3. To further connect the community of Cedro Galan and Manna Project, building deeper and more personal relationships.
4. To give families in Cedro Galan an opportunity to support Manna Project.

In order to further these goals, the PDs will be treated as part of the family rather than as guests, complete with household chores, and will continue to prepare and run programs as usual. While the home stay will doubtless bring its challenges, we know it will be a tremendously enlightening experience.

Highlight: Kid's English

Children’s English is a bi-weekly class led by PDs Leah and Jan Margaret with a great deal of support from Anina. The attendance has remained fairly constant and catered to our neighbors from 13.5 (“thirteen-five” - the folks who live right down the road at kilometer 13.5) and Chiquilistagua, the neighborhood surrounding El Salero. The rambunctious 10-or-so year olds always bring a lot of energy and sass to every class in the El Salero library. After completing units on the City and Transportation, Children’s English courses during the month of October focused on learning Animals. From zoo creatures to common ones such as dogs, cats, and geckos, we’ve introduced the children to the wild wonderful world of animals in English. The children seem to enjoy the fun activities that accompany classes such as Bingo or Memory, while as a teacher, I enjoy the interesting things we discover such as the fact that one student can do a perfect imitation of a cow moo. Moreover, the children have taken to yelling out the names of the animals we pass every day on the way to and from class: “Dog! Dog!” “Cow!” “Horse! Horse! Horse!” Little moments like this, when we catch them using and practicing what they’ve learned in class, always bring a smile to my face.

After a few months of transitioning, Leah and I have been able to make this class our own with an established structure for each day. We begin every course with the reading of the rules. Although our chavalos continually fight over who gets to read each rule (the “última” or last one being the class favorite), it seems like the constant repetition of classroom expectations helps the children focus and know what is to be asked of them. We continue by practicing introductions, common questions, and pronunciation. After our introduction, we introduce new words and review the old. An appropriate worksheet follows, and finally, the hour concludes with a game of some sort to captivate their attentions and engage their minds and memories. Provided that each child is well behaved and participates, they receive a sticker for good attendance - a prized item counted towards the attendance party held at the end of each unit/month. This month, we are also hoping to surprise the children with a trip to the local zoo in order to practice what they have learned thus far: city, transportation, and animal vocabulary.

Jan Margaret Rogers

Program Director

MPI Nicaragua

Highlight: Creative Arts - World Tour

Literacy's (Cedro) weekly trip to the library at El Salero has brought with it exposure to a certain learning device that, while regarded as a typical school wall decoration, is sadly lacking in many Nicaraguan classrooms. That tool is... a world map. I had been very grateful for it and the other Central American and Nicaraguan maps that hang in the August's library, and smiled to see that our students often gazed at them. However, I became slightly less hopeful when at one point I walked up to two of our 14 year-old girls and asked them to show me where Nicaragua was.

After a full minute of moving through Asia, Europe, and Africa with their index fingers, glancing expectantly back at me for my withheld affirmation, I laughed and pointed to Nicaragua for them.

Manna has both Literacy and Mathematics classes to address illiteracy and innumeracy, but an oft forgotten basic functionality is map literacy. In an attempt to meet the needs presented by map illiteracy, and with the added bonus of expanding our students' exposure to world cultures, Kelly and I have incorporated a world tour into MPI's Creative Arts program in Cedro Galan. To help in this venture, Manna has purchased its own world map that now hangs in El Farito, our classroom building.

Kelly's Continent Showdown has been a hit with the kids

In an introduction into geography in which we colored our own maps by continent and made paper machê globes. Our study of art around the world first took us to France, where we painted in the styles of Van Gogh and Monet, and also built our own Eiffel Towers from marshmallows and toothpicks. Our next stop was the U.S., where we studied Native (North) Americans, making headdresses and dancing along with a pow wow video.

Ulises concentrates on painting the continents on his globe

The United States also presented the opportunity to introduce our class to abstract art, something Kelly and I had been looking forward to, because what better way to express creativity and originality? After a slide show of paintings by Rothko and Pollock, we followed the style of the latter to create our own action art.

Samuel and Geral took a particular liking to the new style of painting

Our world tour through art will next take us to Spain, which will see our Creative Arts class act our bull fighting, the running of the bulls, and bring us to draw our dreams like Dalí and our self-portraits in the cubist style of Picasso.

Highlight: Chureca - Love Light & Melody

Manna Project is relieved to know that it is not the only organization working to dampen the harsh effects of life within Chureca's grip. Among them is Love Light & Melody, an NGO seeking to spread awareness of Managua's city dump and its residents. Their most recent video showcases Dia de Luz, or "Day of Light," a March concert organized by the organization and put on in the community. The video is a telling view, or as telling as a digital stopover can provide, of one of MPI Nicaragua's focus communities.

Day of Light from Love Light & Melody on Vimeo.

Highlight: Chureca - in Pictures

MPI attempts to limit the number of photographs taken in Chureca by its volunteers in order to respect the privacy of the community members, and also with a desire to reduce as a spectacle what is, sadly yet certainly, a home. However, we do respect the power of visual stimulus to carry the reality of the dump beyond its confines, and the amazing work of friend of Manna Brian Shumway does exactly that:

La Chureca by Brian Shumway

Highlight: Chureca - Joy Is Resilient

Our visitations last Thursday to families in our Child Sponsorship Program took us through the heaviest fumes my lungs have yet braved. With burning eyes and failing voices, we walked through white smoke so thick that shadows cut visible swaths of black in the milky air. Though worried for her, it was no surprise that Maudelia's two year-old daughter, who she carried at her side, carried in turn a coarse and incessant cough.

As we rounded a corner of the single-room school that services the area, I noticed a boy gazing down at us from his perch in the leafless branches of a tree that barely rose above the corrugated metal separating his house from the next. He wore only tattered shorts and splashed mud on his chest. He looked to be well past seven, the age at which Nicaraguan children begin their schooling.

After trading his name for mine I asked, "Y porque no andas en escuela?" And why are you not in school?

In the broken Nicañole that Chureca teaches its children, he patiently explained that he was not permitted the luxury of an education because the house could not be left unattended while his father worked in the trash.

Left with a piercing feeling of impotence and that now familiar loss for words, my gaze fell through the fumes to my feet and the mange-riden animal not far from them. The seconds passed, and not knowing what else to say to my new friend whose unfortunate predicament I had just reminded him of, I absent-mindedly directed my next words to the dog at my feet. "Qué nota, perro?" What's up, dog?

Laughter suddenly burst through the air. Surprised and confused, my downtrodden spirit eagerly soaked in his broad smile and careless cackles. And, in that moment, as his laughter infected the air, I knew that it was no less real than the smoke it joined.

As living conditions range, nothing that I have known has any liberty to call itself Chureca's peer. This reality in mind, I am constantly perplexed that thoughts of my mornings in that desolate place are inexorably... joyful. Though seemingly counterintuitive, I cannot ignore that each visit brings cheer with a frequency almost insultingly disproportionate to the surrounding destitution.

Nicaragua's second discourse, taught in strife witnessed and smiles wielded, has been that whether life exists in privilege or penury, whether found on marble floors or shattered glass, joy is resilient.

Ian Rountree

Program Director

MPI Nicaragua