Help Nicaraguan Parents Build 5 Rural Preschools

A call from the mountains some 7 hours by truck and horseback from Mulukukú was heard in early May.  There is a dilapidated primary school In the community of Holy Family 15 preschoolers met in the back of a multi-graded one-room primary school where 72 primary students with one teacher have been studying.  Now the third of September a new and larger primary classroom and a smaller preschool were completed and inaugurated by parents, teachers, and representatives from neighboring schools, churches, the city council of Mulukukú, and friends.   In three months, fathers and community residents with a master builder had hauled materials from trucks to the site and built the schools.

But that is not all.  The parents had spent the previous two months with machetes, shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows constructing  5 kilometers of dirt roadway by hand so that the trucks could bring the construction materials, sand, rock, and blocks closer to the school leaving them on about 20 minutes to haul everything by hand and by horses to the school location.  It was indeed a reason to celebrate.  A kitchen was set up in the now-abandoned old school and a royal lunch served to all who attended.

We want to thank you for all your support of this program.  We have now met our goal and the children in these mountainous communities have their preschools. This will be our last report and we want to thank you for partnering with the parents of this rural area to build preschools.

Good news in the midst of the pandemic and the powerful start of the rainy season now underway: four of the five preschools planned through this project have now been completed.  “WOW  We did it, all together,” exclaimed one coordinator.

Mulukukú now has 4 new rural preschools, with children running in and out of their new environment not quite believing that this is going to be their new schools. One of the schools is a double preschool because the enrollment doubled during the construction phase and the parents made allowance for this surge.  Each school has a different amount of students enrolled between 15 and 30. Now the parents of the fifth school have started their preschool with the walls going up rapidly.  

It is mid school year with the heavy rain starting up so everyone is anxious. Teachers are anxiously waiting to try out new Montessori materials that had started to arrive before the virus hit Nicaragua.  One of the invisible effects of the corona Virus pandemic is that United States Mail to many third world countries has been interrupted.  We have a commitment from a Montessori school in the USA that is closing to receive their materials but when they went to the post office they were denied. “There is no mail service to Nicaragua.” There are at least 50 countries that the US postal service is not serving at this time because of the pandemic.  We have no international flights coming in so we cannot get airmail.  So the promised material is waiting until there is mail service between the United States and Nicaragua, which we believe will happen.

It seems that the communities in the rural areas of Múlukuku have so far been spared the infection of Covid-19 and the people are not being advised to take any precautions.  Since these schools are part of the ministry of education they have remained open in the midst of this virus.   We know that this is a time when many families are suffering around the world from the effects of Covid 19 and we pray that you be protected from all sickness and economic loses. We give thanks to God and to each one of you who in the middle of such difficulties have made a dream come true for teachers and children of the mountains to have preschools.  Thank you.  A special prayer for children that we are sharing during the Corona Pandemic: “Oh God be good to me the sea is so big and my boat is so small.”

Links:

• video about cornona virus to animate to stay at home.