Jamie McCaughey and Emma Hill visited the barrio (where EI works) in December last year and found it to be an incredibly memorable experience. They have since been volunteering with Empowerment International and creating regular newsletters for the organization. Here they describe their experience in detail:
“We visited Granada recently and were moved by touring the barrio and meeting the children and their families. The city changes slowly, bit by bit, as you walk out from the center toward the edge.
On the surface, colonial buildings give way to more modern but good concrete homes; then solid wood and metal homes; then salvaged wood and scrap metal homes; and finally homes made of the most basic materials. By the time we reached the edge of town, we watched a beautiful sunset in a field behind a house made of sticks and plastic sheets.
Despite the decreasing material wealth the farther we went, our feelings were not of sorrow or despair but of hope and promise. The spirit of the people and the sense of community were moving and powerful. We spoke with a young boy who, with raw sewage flowing down the street alongside his bare feet, told us that his favorite class was math and that he wanted to be an engineer. We met a father of a child in the program who, as he was telling us his very insightful ideas for keeping teenagers engaged in school, carefully tied the shoelaces of his young daughter’s Mickey Mouse doll to her delight. We met teenaged girls who were engaged in school and had grown from that commitment who hoped to help others stay engaged as well.
The parents care deeply for the children and the community cares deeply that the children attend and succeed in school. It was clear to us that the community-based approach of Empowerment International was building success with success; as more children went to school, more people placed more value on schooling. We met people who were empowered, who had a sense of hope grounded in confidence in their own self-worth and in their own abilities to improve their situation, and who worked in the present while looking to the future. All of this has been achieved not with a top-down injection of masses of money but by a bottom-up approach that helps people find in themselves the ability to make things better. We left the barrio feeling young.”
- Jamie McCaughey and Emma Hill
In Nicaragua 50% of the kids that start 1st grade never finish 5th grade. It is our goal to make this percentage drop significantly.
$100 is what it takes us at Empowerment International to put a child in school for a year. Imagine, for the price of a pair of Nikes you can help a child attend school for one year! If the idea interests you, please click on the link below or contact us -
