BACKGROUND:
This
past April vacation 15 TAG (Talented & Gifted Latino Student Club) O’Bryant
students and 2 students from CRLS girls soccer team (Cambridge Rindge &
Latin School) volunteered their time to teach English, Spanish and science to
young children in Jinotega, Nicaragua.
The project started in May of 2011, when the TAG E-Board began doing
research on potential service learning projects in the United States and Latin
America. In the fall there was a
final vote, where the majority of TAG E-Board members decided to select
Outreach 360’s orphanage prevention program in Jinotega.
Nicaragua is the 3rd poorest
Latin American nation and it has suffered from a history of
brutal dictatorships (often sponsored by the United States), civil wars, and
natural disasters. Jinotega is a coffee producing town of nearly 51,000
people, where according to the World Bank most
of its people are small farmers, nearly half of the population lives under
extreme poverty (the average person makes $2 day), nearly half of the
population is illiterate and a significant number of children do not complete
primary school and also suffer from malnutrition. While Boston public
schools focus on trying to get every child to graduate high school and to go on
to college, the Nicaraguan Education Ministry’s goal for Jinotega is to get
every child to finish the 6th grade! The problems were numerous, but Team Nicaragua 2012 focused
on the power of hope, solidarity and education. As the great and late Brazilian
educator Paulo Freire once said:
“Education either functions as an instrument
which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the
logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the
practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and
creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation
of their world.”
