Los Quinchos

     Today we started the day visiting all of the NGOs that we will be working with during our stay here in Granada. It was cool to see the different places and how they compare to the community partners that Bonner works with in the Trenton area. We visited Obras Sociales Sor Maria Romero, a site that works in the poorest neighborhood surrounding Granada providing after school homework help and facilitating athletic activities (such as futbol and basketball). Tomorrow we will visit to see a show that they are putting on.
     We then visited La Providencia, a home for elderly people who have either been abandoned by their families or have no family left. This will be my site for the first few days (starting Monday) and I have a feeling that it is going to be rough. It seems like a pretty emotional and defeating site, and on top of that, the language barrier makes it hard to communicate one-on-one. But I said I was up to anything and this is not excluded.
     After La Providencia, we drove to the Casa Lago site of Los Quinchos. Translatd to Engish Los Quinchos roughly means "little dirty street kids." Los Quinchos is an organization that works with street kids in Nicaragua by rehabilitating them, educating them, and teaching them a skill (one of the kids that we met today handcrafted hammocks). The Los Quinchos process starts in Managua by exposing the kids to the program and encouraging them to volunteer for full entrance into the program. They are then brought to one of the many sites in Nica, the Casa Lago site in Granada is for adolescent boys who have been in the program for some time. The facility is close to Lake Nicaragua and is in a secluded area on the outskirts of Granada. We were given a short tour and were told that we would return later in the day for some service.
     Our final stop before lunch was at El Centro Pablo A Cuadra, a public school serving the poorest neighborhood in the Granada area. Visiting the site really hit me. Besides driving through the neighborhood and seeing the poor quality housing (what I thought I would be living in here) in comparison with downtown Granada, I was struck by the small size and condition of the school-which serves 750 students from primeria to secondaria. I was amazed that 750 kids would even be able to fit in such a space. And on top of that, there was one bathroom with no running water. I was appauled really, especially when we were told the small amount of American money it would take to fix it. In the future, I hope that we can tell problems like this one to the next group of Bonners to go to Nicaragua so that they can fundraise and fix it for them. Many of the rooms at the school were built by foreign organizations (like Bonner) who fundraised to help them out.
     After lunch at our houses, we went back to Los Quinchos to help clean up the area where the boys dormitiories are. We will be working there for the remainder of this week, helping to make the place look nicer, fix up the basketball court, and other projects similar to that. While it was hot, I sweated bullets, and the manual labor (which entailed cleaning around the cement so that trees can be planted) was far from easy, I really enjoyed working there. I loved being able to interact with some of the boys there. One boy, Michael, who is 13, had fun working and talking to the group, while two others immediately "fell in love" with Maria, calling her their novia (which one of them claimed to already have ten of). Overall my experience there was fantastic and I can't wait to return tomorrow.
     Today was a great day. I loved getting more exposure to what Nicaragua is really like and I am getting to know the city of Granada pretty well. In other news...80 degrees is starting to feel pretty cool, I can't imagine how frigid the airport will feel by the end of the trip.