Nicaragua Blog #4: Working in San Miguel Arcangel School in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua

Students at San Miguel Arcangel School, with Grupo Fenix coordinator Susan Kinne and our team members Deb Bruns, Lorie Hammond, Emma Clancy, and Gaby Valenzuela

We were there!  For one week, we taught at San Miguel Arcangel, a small public school with three classrooms: kindergarten, 1-3 grade, and 4-6 grade.  Just as Davis is a parallel sister community to Sabana Grande, due to both of their environmentalism, agricultural emphasis, and emphasis on civic action, this village school seems a great sister school for Peregrine, due to its similar scale.

The school day in Sabana Grande begins with a flag salute, in which children sing patriotic songs, and sometimes recite poetry.  Here children enthusiastically raise their hands to their revolution and democracy. Most wear blue and white uniforms.

Maestras Gaby and Emma teach Peregrine school Spanish songs such as Buenos Dias and Hey, Hey, Siguen me, to the school children in Sabana Grande

The week before we arrived in Nicaragua, high school students from Da Vinci High in Davis helped the students in San Miguel Arcangel School to rig up a bicycle driven water pump for their vegetable garden.  Shown below is the endpoint for this pump- a hose which brings water to their garden.  Pictured are the hose and some healty carrot beds in the garden.  If water can be brought to the garden using bicycle pumping, it is much easier than carrying it in buckets, as they had to do before. 

In our week in Nicaragua, we did a lot of music and dancing led by Maestras Gaby and Emma.  We also did a community study to share with our students at Peregrine School, so that children can compare their lives.  This will be one of our study themes this year.

Students at the school were asked to make a map of their town, and then to build models of their houses and other important places and put them on their map.  Theirs is a very small town, with no paved roads and no major buildings, save the new solar center and solar restaurant which are part of the Grupo Fenix project. 

The central feature of Sabana Grande is the mighty Ceiba Tree, where most important ceremonies such as graduations, weddings, communions, and more are held.  Susan Kinne, the coordinator of Grupo Fenix, and our teachers, Deb, and I worked with students to make models of their houses out of paper and various materials, and to construct a map of their village showing where these houses go in relation to the highways and the ceiba tree.  

Susan Kinne, Engineering Professor, works with students on their 3-D paper houses for their

Community map

Each student at Sabana Grande also wrote a letter to Peregrine Students, so that we can match students with pen pals at the elementary school.  Our goal is to create a spirit of internationalism and sharing, with a realization that we are both similar and different communities.  Our similarities lie in our commitments to agriculture, environmentalism, and civic involvement.  Our differences are in our resource base: Sabana Grande is not on the grid, and has many fewer economic resources.

One challenge which knowing life in Sabana Grande creates for all of us can be framed:

If a community not on the world energy grid, i.e. not using fossil fuels, is able to provide for its needs with solar and bicycle power, as well as people power, can Americans do the same?  

Children create 3-D houses in ingenious ways using colored paper and other simple materials.