by Janet and Derrick Gee

The Story So Far …

If you are new to our projects, here is a bit of background. The Richland Center community has been paired as a Sister City with Santa Teresa in Nicaragua. In 1997, then mayor José Martinez asked us to help with the Chacocente Wildlife Refuge communities because they were the poorest part of his municipality. The families were mostly subsistence farmers trying to survive in the tropical dry forest of a nature reserve and adjacent to a Pacific beach which is a world-famous nesting site for the olive ridley and leatherback sea turtles. The local population, and many outsiders, were supplementing their meager income by selling turtle eggs. In addition, some of their farming practices were detrimental to the dry forest remnants within the Refuge. Since our work in Chacocente began in 1999, our mission has been to develop a more sustainable way of life for the villagers with better health care, education and income sources while preserving the habitat and its wildlife for future generations

Two Steps Forward …

From our Third World experience, we’d say that “two steps forward and one back” is a ratio that may not be cause for celebration, but is certainly beyond expectations. And that is about where we find ourselves today after a busy visit to the Chacocente Project early this year.

The “one back” part of the ratio is represented by the need to part company, by mutual consent, with our sole employee and project facilitator, Leonidas Grijalva. We appreciate the huge challenge of being the lonely, remote representative of a far-away organization in a different culture. But, we felt that the flow of communications among the people of the communities, Leonidas, and the SCP board was no longer transparent enough for us to make effective progress.

However, this change has given us the opportunity to look back over the five and one half years that we have been working in Chacocente, to assess our strengths and weaknesses and to see emerge from this process a clearer “model’ of the support that we can provide in the future. Up to now, we have been working with just four of the seventeen communities in and around the wildlife refuge, so this new clarity gives us the basic tool to take on more villages, given the financial resources The model, now approved by the Sister City Board lays out the following steps in tackling future groups of communities:

1. Take time to survey and understand the community, both socially and economically
2. Form a representative structure of community members, train them in their new responsibility and empower them.
3. Meet basic infrastructural and environmental needs (health, education etc) with donated funds from our supporters and from third party sources and with labor donated by the community.
4. Enhance income sources in an environmentally-responsible way with a combination of donated funds and micro-credit.

What does this mean for our 2006 activities? First, in our existing four communities, we will believe that much of our infra-structural phase is complete (Step 3 of the model), We have built schools, dug wells, built latrines, started a natural medicine program and introduced more sustainable methods of crop production, So these areas will now receive less funding.

The focus will be on income-generating projects (Step 4 of the model). Some of these were already under way last year- a sewing co-op, for example. This year, we are adding honey production and will begin to experiment with ecotourism.

Our model emphasizes the need for us to empower the members of the communities. This year, we will train the elected Commission members in communication skills, such as email, and also help with the legalization of this body so that it is ready to stand on its own feet. As our communities are several miles from electricity and even further from a reliable phone line, emailing means a journey that can take a whole day!

Our visit and that of our president, Jane Furchgott, together with Linda Stadler, last December also enabled us to get to know better the work of two other, much larger organizations who have come, recently, to help preserve Chacocente. They are Fauna and Flora international (FFI) from Britain and DED from Germany. Though their presence is only temporary, they have access to much expertise and are cooperating closely with us, having found out for themselves, the degree of confidence that the community members have expressed in the ability of our project to deliver on its promises.

A central purpose of our recent visit was to interview candidates for our vacant facilitator position. After meeting with them and collecting the views of all the stakeholders in this process, we decided to retain two people, each on a part-time basis and on a three-month trial. Both are from the Santa Teresa area and have previous experience working with organizations that help the poor of Nicaragua. Marlon Palacio has been working with FFI and so is already familiar with Chacocente. He will take responsibility for facilitating most of the projects in our existing communities and for training the Commission in communication.

Alma Susana Chavez carried out work with the sea turtles of Chacocente as a volunteer and has a passion for ecology. She will look after sewing and education in our existing projects and will support Jane Furchgott in continuing to work for turtle preservation. However, Alma Susana is being given a new and exciting additional responsibility. With this new team already working well, we have the confidence to move forward into more communities. So, following Step 1 of our model, Alma Susana will begin a study of the thirteen outlying communities. We hope that, by later this year, we will have sufficient information to begin expansion.

So, that feels like at least two steps forward! There is plenty of work ahead and little chance of us running out of opportunities to make a difference for people that, until now, the world has left more than one step behind.