Saludos! Greetings from sweltering hot Managua, we´re right in the middle of the hottest time of the year and even though I´ve been through a couple Managua summers it still hits you hard! I think we might be over the hump though-I´m looking forward to the rain in the coming months that should cool things down (although it also means more humidity). I recently enjoyed the week off of work during Holy Week by visiting friends and getting out of the Managua heat. The highlight was an Easter vigil with a bonfire in a community in Esteli, a northern mountainous department, followed by an Easter morning sunrise hike! On the work side we´re busy as ever but doing well. I do think we´re heading in the right direction with the youth program and the youth movement in Ciudad Sandino. The last weekend before the Semana Santa break, we had a three day retreat on personal growth with about 40 youth, 10 from each of the four territories where CANTERA works. This was the first of a series of four encounters that will take place over the next three months with a running theme of a ¨Proyecto de Vida¨, or a ¨Life Project¨, focusing on goals and dreams, something these youth don´t often have a space to consider. The specific theme of this first encounter was to look at family relationships and confront challenges and difficulties encountered there. Unfortunately, while the family should be the first and strongest support system, for many of these youths it is a place of pain and disillusion. The vast majority of the participants on the retreat were facing issues of abandonment, violence, alcoholism, etc. The idea of looking at these challenges in relationships that should be supportive is to help the youth let go of the anger and resentment that a young person might justifiably feel towards a parent who has not fulfilled his or her role. If a young person goes on carrying that weight it will only impede his or her pursuit of a ¨proyecto de vida¨ and whats more will likely be carried on to future generations. At least that´s the idea. Of course this was a very emotional encounter and it was extremely difficult for some of the youth to face these issues. The hope is that through the experience of the four encounters the participants might go through a formation process that puts them on a path of pursuing their personal dreams and of breaking the cycle of violence that many of them have lived through. As I reflected on the experience for the youth though, I thought that this kind of experience, while it´s only directly affecting 40 young people, is the essence of the youth program of CANTERA, what we are trying to achieve with youth throughout the four territories. Check out the photo above of the group from the retreat!

International Women´s Day

Last week we celebrated International Women´s Day a day early, on March 7th with a youth fair focused on providing information for women´s rights and prevention of gender based violence. International Women´s Day is a BIG deal here in Nicaragua, which was a surprise to me considering I had never even heard of it before I came here. That´s a bit ironic considering the roots of the celebration are in feminist movements in the U.S., but it doesn´t seem to get the kind of attention up north as it does here. In Nicaragua, it is both a day of activism of demanding fair treatment and a day of celebration of women. At CANTERA-Ciudad Sandino we organized the Feria Juvenil with the youth movement (MOJUV) to provide a space for young people to come together and reach out to the community with information on a very important theme here. We invited different government institutions such as the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of the Family to come set up an informative stand and share information, as well as non-government organizations to share the work that they do in the community. Because our strength at CANTERA is our socio-cultural program (which is how most of the youth we work with get involved), we also organized a cultural program throughout the day. There were traditional and modern dance groups, music and popular theater presentations on themes of violence and gender equality. All of this came together with several weeks of planning and organizing to encourage other organizations to participate. We were thrown a real curve late in the planning process though: we found out the afternoon before the event that due to Hugo Chavez´s death, we would no longer be able to hold the Feria in front of the City Hall, since the entire country is in seven days of mourning! We had to scramble to move the event, but we found a way to make it work. We set up camp in the street outside the CANTERA center, and although it wasn´t as central as the City Hall, there was still a good crowd checking out the informational stands and the cultural acts. And as a friend pointed out to me after the event, the best part about it was that we literally took back the streets! We were dancing and doing theater in the street, reaching out to the community on a grass roots level. Check out the MOJUV facebook page for lots of pictures of the event, and hopefully for some video clips soon. Que vivan las mujeres! http://www.facebook.com/groups/78089564763/?ref=ts&fref=ts

Let the delegations begin!

One of our responsibilities as part of the CANTERA youth program is to host delegation groups that visit from schools and churches in the States. CANTERA organizes a visit for them to get to know the work that is carried out and see some of the authentic barrios and rural communities of Nicaragua. They idea is that they might have an educational experience to learn about the reality of living here, as oppose to a vacation in which they would just visit tourist sites. ` Last week we hosted our first delegation group of the year in the Ciudad Sandino site. They were a group of high schoolers with several adult leaders. We started out the visit by taking the group to visit some of the houses where the youth live. The differences from a middle class neighborhood in the U.S. are all too clear: houses on the edge of the ¨cause¨, a drainage that is perpetually filled with garbage; several families living in one house, often up to 15 people under one roof; laundry done by hand and bucket showers because of low or non-existent water pressure. Following the home visits, we took the group for a tour of the center to see the activities going on. The highlight of the visit for me was seeing the jaws drop on the North American high schoolers as they saw our dance group go into action. There`s a lot I have to critique about globalization and U.S. cultural values, but there really is something special about music that brings people together. So when Beyonce`s ¨Crazy in Love¨came on (anyone see her rock it during the Super Bowl halftime show??), I could just see the U.S. youth itching to get out there with the dance group. We had a quick informal class and within 20 minutes we had the whole group swiveling back and forth, jumping around and pumping up and down to Beyonce! What a moment to bring kids together... We followed the dance class with a visit to the karate training and finished up with a reflection between youth from Ciudad Sandino and those from the States. This was the first of several delegation visits we will be receiving, and I was very encouraged by the openness of the group and by the welcoming spirit of the youth here.

Back in Nicalandia!

Greetings from Ciudad Sandino! I´m reactivating my long abandoned blog here in an attempt to keep friends and family up to date with what´t going on here in Nicaragua. After finishing up two years as a Jesuit Volunteer in Managua, I spent a wonderful 2012 catching up with old friends and relatives, meeting new friends, and traveling around the West Coast. I had the great privilege to stay in a Catholic Worker community in Guadalupe, CA, for several months, learning about that approach to community living and a combination of direct charity work (food distribution) and critiquing system injustices. I then spent the rest of the year reconnecting with family and friends in the unparalleled Pacific Northwest, and somewhere along the way I decided to accept a position to return to Nicaragua! So here I am, once again with CANTERA-Center for Communication and Popular Education. As a JV I spent most of my time in the urban barrio of Jorge Dimitrov, but now I´ll be based in Ciudad Sandino, on the outskirts of the capitol city. Along with one coworker and several very dedicated volunteers and ¨promoters¨, I´ll be helping to coordinate the youth program here in Ciudad Sandino. We offer classes in karate, dance, theater, arts and crafts, aerobics, and in general try and create a safe place for youth to grow together. It seems like it will end up being a balance of some more institutional, administrative type work (we have to respond to funding organizations that make our work possible) and some more direct work with the youth, helping organize workshops and retreats and getting to know them by supporting their socio-cultural activities. Here´s a link for the facebook page for ¨MOJUV¨, the ¨Movimiento de Juventudes¨ which is accompanied by CANTERA here in Ciudad Sandino. Check it out if you want to learn more and see some great pics! http://www.facebook.com/groups/78089564763/?fref=ts My hope is to provide brief updates on this blog (hopefully more frequently than I did as a JV!). If you have particular question about the work, or Nicaragua in general, I´d be happy to try and answer. All the best to my dear friends and family! Un abrazo, Sean Vicente.