Quick work. Three days ago Verena wrote to ask whether she could visit us to get to know our Foundation better, to make photographs and to live with us for three days.
And there she is, a German who newly arrived in Nicaragua three weeks ago, and her Spanish not yet at a level that she can easily chat with others in the home. But she is not going to be deterred by that!
She pays for her three months’ trip to Nicaragua out of her own pocket and came through a German organization in Granada that recruits volunteers for social work projects in Nicaragua. She felt that having a working holiday suits her better than ‘just doing your own thing’.
We only recently got in touch with the organization in Granada. As often is the case with small organisations, they are dynamic, act quickly and decisively. In their first email to us they asked for photographs that they could use for their recruitment. I wrote back that the project had only just started with some humble activities and that we do not yet have a whole archive of photographs of activities with the target group. Would five pictures be enough? They agreed and got to work expeditiously!
Enter Verana. She stayed for three days, had interviews with members of the Board, participated in all activities that were on the programme and made many pictures. We are also very very happy with the videos that she made on the day that our candidate housemates, Loyda and Daniel, were visiting us. It means that we have a baseline record of how they are now, that can be compared with observations we will make later, to assess differences in their development. Verana’s work has of course also contributed to a more professional outlook for our brochure.
The University of Central America (UCA)
In the meantime also two students of the UCA in Managua are working with us as part of their course work to support social organisations. They travelled to Juigalpa to explain the purpose of their mission and to make an inventory of the needs of our project. We are now awaiting their work plan, the implementation of which should be finished by mid-August.
We will have to wait and see how useful this will be. But we are happy with the interest in our project and their desire to contribute to our work. We hope that this will be the start of a win-win collaboration.
Together we can make a difference! The pebble that we threw into the pond gets surrounded by more and more widening circles!