Presidential Elections

With United States presidential elections one year away, voters and candidates are already keeping a keen eye on the evolution of the presidential race. Few Americans are aware, however, that Nicaraguan’s presidential election is right around the corner—this coming Sunday, to be exact! Incumbent Daniel Ortega is a founding member of the ruling FSLN party (Sandinista National Liberation Front), and has amended the constitution to run for a third term. The FSLN is the socialist party that came to power after the Sandinista evolution of the 1970s, during which time Ortega served his first term as president.

Ortega’s opposition is divided between four candidates, two of which are supported by the majority of remaining voters. Fabio Gadea represents the PLI party, the right wing independent party that has merged with the more liberal MRS party to form an opposition coalition to the FSLN. Arnoldo Aleman is the candidate of the right wing PLN party, and previously served as one of the nation’s two PLN presidents in the 1990s.

While anticipation of the November 6^th election was already apparent when we arrived in July, campaigning has now reached an all time high. Last Wednesday, we were puzzled by low attendance in our kids’ classes before learning that the FSLN had bussed all children in our area to a Managua amusement park. Sandinista rallies took place all weekend, with Ortega supporters proudly sporting t-shirts with Ortega’s youth slogan “Amor, paz, y vida,” while hanging posters throughout the community. Opposition supporters were out in full force as well, holding rallies of their own in Managua and paying door-to-door visits to garner support for the PLN and PLI. While cheering for Jesse during his Saturday soccer game, a red dog reminiscent of Clifford kept us company. We quickly deduced that the PLN had hosted a rally near the soccer field that morning, during which they opted to dye our furry friend a bright shade of PLN red.

For more information on the Nicaraguan presidential elections, we recommend the following article in Nicaragua Dispatch, an English language online Nicaraguan newspaper: http://www.nicaraguadispatch.com/politics/will-democracy-survive-elections/978

Enjoy!

Rain, rain, go away...

Cola was not a happy camper

Farito "road"

The day after we last updated our blog, it started raining. We’re still in the rainy season here in Nicaragua, so we can normally expect one to two hour thunderstorms every afternoon. This rain, however, was different. It began in the afternoon, but unlike our standard daily thunderstorms, it simply didn’t stop. The aguacero continued for nine days, drenching crops, flooding roads and houses, and prompting President Ortega to declare a national state of emergency.

Here at the Manna house, we initially complained at having to deal with power outages, an inability to effectively dry laundry, and our two miserable, soggy dogs. However, after venturing into Cedro Galan and Chiquilistagua and witnessing the damage wrought by the storm, we realized that our rainy woes were small in comparison to others. A large tree fell near Salero—the community center in which we work in Chiquilistagua—taking power lines and electricity for much of the surrounding community with it. In La Chureca, flooding forced seven families to spend several nights in the local school. Here in Cedro Galan, the road to Farito frequently became a large river with a sizeable current, making the walk to classes unsafe if not completely impossible. We were thus forced to cancel several programs last week, and those classes that we did have were marked by unusually low attendance. Fear of sickness and the necessity to deal with the effects of heavy rain render many Nicaraguans reluctant to leave home during storms.

As relief efforts continue throughout the country, however, there is some good news: the sun is out!!! Clothes, roads, and crops are finally drying out, and moods are improving. Here’s hoping that we’ve made it through the worst of the rainy season!

Retreat and Quarterly Review

Beautiful beach sunset

Getting ready for a delicious meal of lasagna

Today we’re lucky to have a guest post from Fiona about our recent staff retreat to the nearby beach town of Pochomil. If you’re interested to read more, Fiona posts regularly at http://fionainnica.blogspot.com. Enjoy!

Last weekend, we had the opportunity to take a few days, get out of the Manna house, and reflect on the past 3 months. It is crazy how quickly the past three months have passed - I still have some days where I feel like I just arrived! Particularly in the past few weeks, I have been very, very busy, and sometimes it's easy to miss the bigger picture when I am so busy with the details. Having a few days to relax as a group, reflect on where we've been and what we've accomplished, and discuss what our goals are for the next few months was both beneficial and enjoyable.

As a group, we made a list of our successes and the things that we are most proud of from the last couple months, and I'd like to share a few of them with you:

• Community relationships - it has been a huge blessing to get the chance to connect with the families who live in Cedro Galan, Chiquilistagua, and La Chureca. I have really enjoyed just having the opportunity to spend time with them, learn more about their daily life, and understand this country and these communities better. I don't have as much time to do this as I wish, but I really enjoy the time I do spend in the community.

• Good transition and continued high attendance in programs - due to the turnover with Manna PDs each year, it's sometimes difficult to have continuity in programs and to maintain attendance as things change. Many people have remarked that we have done a good job picking up where last year's PDs left off and continuing forward with each program. It has been great to see our program attendance remain high, and in some programs even increase.

• Our first milk day without the old PDs, the day where we hand out food for the month to our child sponsorship kiddos, went off incredibly smoothly. A lot of this had to do with two qualities which kept coming up again and again as successes: everyone's ability to be proactive and to be flexible. A combination of these two is definitely needed here - as a group, we've been able to do quite a bit due to everyone being proactive, and have a clean house, a restructured English program, and some new partnerships to show for it. However, as with everything here in Nicaragua, nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and flexibility is key. :)

There's many more, but those are definitely a few of the highlights for me from the past few months.

We also took the opportunity to make some goals for the next few months. They ranged from small things, like trying every flavor of ice cream at the store next to Farito and keeping the house clean, to bigger goals like reaching out to more families in the communities, saying thank you more often, and planning ahead more for our programs. I hope that, in a few more months when we have our second retreat, we're able to look back on these goals and count them as our successes.

Chase Community Giving Awards Update #1

Thanks to your support, we’re off to a great start in the Chase Community Giving Competition. We’re extremely excited at the opportunity to win $1 million, and our goal is definitely within reach. As of right now, we’re in third place, but are only 150 votes behind the leading organization!

For those of you who are just now joining us, Manna Project has been chosen as one of 25 organizations competing in the Chase Community Giving Awards. Voting started today, and we need your support in order to win! If you haven’t already, please take 30 seconds to go to this link and cast a vote for Manna Project.

You can also help us raise awareness by attending our facebook event! Just click here to join the 6,000 people invited to attend!

One million dollars could change the lives of thousands of children and young adults in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Guatemala. Here in Nicaragua, additional funding would enable to us to expand our child sponsorship program in La Chureca, meet the growing demand for additional English classes in Cedro Galan and Chiquilistagua, and further develop new programs such as our microfinance initiative and women’s exercise classes.

Stay tuned for more updates on our progress in this exciting competition, and thank you again for your invaluable support!

We Need Your Help!

Hello everyone! We have some very exciting news to share! Two years ago, Manna Project participated in the Chase Community Giving competition, and won $25,000. This year, we’ve been invited to participate again, and we have the chance to win up to $1 million!! We are extremely grateful for the chance to compete, and excited about all the ways that the money could help the communities we work with in Nicaragua, Ecuador and Guatemala. Here in Nicaragua, the money would allow us to provide more financial support to the clinic in La Chureca, more microfinance loans to start-up businesses in Cedro Galan, and much more.

We need your help to win! The week-long competition takes place on Facebook, and voting starts today. Can you take 30 seconds to help us? All you have to do is go to this link and cast a vote for Manna Project. If you have 30 more seconds to spare, can you help us even more and send this information to your contacts to encourage them to vote, as well?

We are very appreciative of your support in this competition and in all the other ways you support Manna Project, and hope to have great news to report about the Chase Community Giving competition when voting ends in a week! Thanks for your vote!

Things that made us smile this week, part two

After a two-week hiatus, we’re back! Sorry again for the delay in posting—most PDs went out of town last week during the holiday celebrating Central American independence, and we’ve been extra busy since our return! As promised, here are more anecdotes that made us smile this week.

· Watching Agdiel, who is extremely handicapped and generally unable to articulate sentences, answer a question asked in English correctly. –Davis

· A three-year-old Nicaraguan student asking if she may use the restroom in English during our Kids English class at Salero. –Davis

· One of our students, who is thirty years old, sprinting to the board during a game of Pictionary yelling the English answer at the top of her lungs, and telling us multiple times how much she had loved the class. –Davis

· Ariel, who generally struggles at math, confidently explaining to Flor, one of our best students, how to find the area of a circle; which we had just taught him. –Davis

· Watching our women’s exercise class do a zumba workout to Danza Kuduro in the water during our pool workout at the Manna house! –Anna

· This week my kid's English class at Colegio Cristiano La Esperanza in La Chureca was amazing. All of the kids were so motivated and focused on learning a hard concept. To see them eager to learn and willing to try with great attitudes even if it meant getting the answer wrong was awesome. The thing that left me beaming all day though was watching them succeed and the pride that showed all over their faces when they got the answers correct. –Jesse

· "Johnny," Luis Fernando's talking basketball, writing the correct answer to a question on the board in our Salero Kids English class. –Maggie

· Francisco, another student in our Salero Kids English class, telling us that we're his family when we got up at 6 am to watch him participate in his school's parade. –Maggie

· Seeing Douglas, a kid in our Child Sponsorship program, sprinting 50 feet down the street in Chureca because he's so excited to see us. –Maggie

· Seeing lots of my students at Mass today, and meeting the adorable little brother of one of my favorite students, William. –Fiona

· Delicious pizza and good conversation with fellow PDs at a nearby Italian restaurant. –Fiona

· Getting a chance to see the house and small store of one of our child sponsorship families in La Chureca. –Fiona

· Jose Raul, one of my math students, understanding how to simplify fractions! –Fiona

Things that made us smile this week

Davis playing Jenga with Janice and Arexa

Maggie and Henry

This past weekend, Fiona shared her most recent blog post, titled “Things that made me smile this week.” After reading her post, several of us in the Manna House were inspired to write similar blogs and emails for our friends and family. The idea is a great one, and helps to explain what makes our work so meaningful here in the communities of Cedro Galan, Chiquilistagua, and La Chureca. Together we’ve compiled a list of experiences that made each of us smile this past week. I thought I’d save some for our next blog post, so stay tuned for more smiles to come!

Things that made us smile this week:

· Randomly running into one of our teen English students, Francisco, at the market on my way to catch a bus, and him actually being excited to see us. –Fiona

· An amazing mother helping her three year old daughter to start learning English, by attending class with her and practicing outside of class as well. –Fiona

· Hearing Lesther, a two-year-old in our child sponsorship program in La Chureca, laugh for the first time. –Fiona

· Realizing that FOIL (an acronym we learned in high school algebra) doesn’t translate to Spanish, and deciding to use a sandwich as an analogy for binomial multiplication. While finding the product of binomials, Jose Antonio, my math student, now mutters “Here is the bread, here is the lunch meat…” –Sam

· The incredible drawings that 14-year-old Samuel makes after math and literacy and lets me take home. Samuel has dropped out of school for the semester and suffers from low self-esteem, so it’s great to see him create something he’s proud of. –Sam

· When our previously unruly girls soccer team responds super well to direction, and doesn’t complain about running suicides! –Sam

· Receiving a drawing of myself and Aydel holding hands. Aydel is a mentally handicapped boy in the community who is 16-years-old and I work with him on learning the alphabet and numbers. He can understand most everything when you talk to him but has a very difficult time saying anything. –Carrie

· Watching the women in exercise class dance Zumba to Shakira’s “Waka Waka” and having the 3-year-old children imitate us! –Carrie

· Singing the weather song with my kid’s English class. (“What’s the weather? What’s the weather? What’s the weather like today? Is it sunnyyy, is it rainyyy, is it cloudyyy, out today!”) –Carrie

· Last week, Davis and I walked home with one of my Kids English students, Norlan. We realized that he walks one hour each way just to come to Farito English classes twice a week. We got a chance to meet his mom and I told her what a great student he is. He was so proud and was grinning from ear to ear. I am so thankful for students like Norlan! –Christin

· Watching Ariel from our loan program making cinderblocks using materials he bought with our loan; also meeting his family and getting to know him better. –Matt

· Hearing from Alejandro that the other students in his math class ask him for help with polynomial expressions—the subject we've been working on for the past few weeks. –Matt