Casa Xalteva Blog

UNM Student Zoe outside of Hijos del Maiz

In her words…

I did my internship in San Blas, a small rural village about 20 minutes by bus outside of Granada, Nicaragua. The village was very different from anything I had experienced or seen in Nicaragua. The community was very poor, most of the houses (or shacks) were constructed with pieces of metal and wood. The living conditions were very simple, but the people and my host family were incredibly warm, generous and caring. I wanted to focus on the education in Nicaragua so I worked in a preschool in the mornings and a public high school in the afternoons.

The preschool had been started by a NGO from Spain called Hijos Del Maiz. The organization started with only a soup kitchen to feed the children in the community once a day. Many families don’t have the money or resources to give their children the proper nutrition they need or to give them enough to eat. It eventually expanded into a preschool, computer classes for the community and also a clinic and a pharmacy. Hijos Del Maiz is a great organization which has helped the community of San Blas in many positive ways. In the afternoons I would go to the public high school and help the English teacher with her classes. The condition of the school was terrible, there were barely enough desks for all the students, the school was old and rundown. There were overwhelming differences between the education in Nicaragua and in the U.S.

My internship was fascinating and it taught me not only about Nicaragua´s education system, but also about the government and
politics, Nicaraguan culture, traditions, people and their way of life. I could not have picked a better internship, I was able to practice Spanish much more than I previously had, I was able to focus on my interests and I learned much more about Nicaragua.

Tags: Community Project, Granada, Nicaragua, Spanish Classes, University of New Mexico, University Program, Volunteers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Casa Xalteva News, Granada Community, International Students, Volunteering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.