Firstly, apologies for not updating this blog sooner. We spent the last week with Trocaire's partner organisation, Cesesma, in San Ramon and La Corona in the beautiful mountains of Nicaragua, with little or no access to communication with the outside world. In the rural community of La Corona, we stayed with a family who treated us like one of their own. I think Cordelia put it best when she said La Corona is the kind of place where people value what's truly important. Dosa Elsa's house is like the social hub of La Corona. It took us around two days to figure out who actually lived there! The similarities between there and the Ireland of the past, the Ireland my father often talks about, is uncanny. Without heed to any of the luxuries or gadgetry we fill our days with back home, people here spend their evenings with the children of the community, who stay up way past their bedtime climbing trees and chasing each other. The adults sit inside, often without light, due to the current energy crisis, and converse about anything and everything, from politics, to the price of things, to which of their sons or nephews they are going to pair myself and Cordelia off with!
Dona Gregoria, Elsa's mother, sits in the corner taking it all in. So rich in a certain moral fibre are the people of La Corona that you forget how little material goods they have. It only really struck me one freezing morning - it had rained all night the night before and was still pelleting down with the kind of ferocity that you wonder how its even possible for it to rain anymore. As we left for work, I saw 8 year old Luis Fernando barefoot and wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts, soaked through and through and searching through the mud for cans to sell.
With Cesesma, we visited many projects, from beekeeping, to a chicken coop, to a reading group, to a schools planting projects, all of which were highly impressive. What's really striking is how it's all at a grassroots level - it's local people working for themselves and their communities. And it's also the integration of the much-loved multiplier effect into everything. For example, Cesesma gave 20 chickens to two local young men in La Grecia, along with the wire for the chicken coop and some feed. Now, with the sale of the eggs, they can buy their own chicken feed and they'll be able to buy more chickens in the future. It comes down to the old teach a man to fish adage, I guess. One of the days we had lunch in the house of one of the young promotores, Irvine, and his dad brought us out to his land where he grows coffee, corn, potatoes and chayas. He tolds us how he has to take out a loan before the big harvest every year, payable after the harvest, and sometimes he makes a loss if what he has to pay back exceeds what he sells. It made me so sad to look around his fields full of food and think that sometimes he didn't have enough to feed his own family. But that's just another reality people here have to contend with, and it makes me proud to be involved with Cesesma, an organisation which offers a hand up, not a hand out. Another striking moment was with the young women and girls network - we were so impressed by their confidence and the way they can speak frankly about their rights, about issues that matter to them, like sexual health, violence and so on. Again, the multiplier effect is at work here - all those promotoras return to their community to share their insights with other girls. All in all, we really enjoyed and were inspired by our time with Cesesma and we are now looking forward to visiting the projects our companions with Trocaire have been spending time with over the next few days.
