On the 15th of January we arrived at the school in La Nueva Esperanza where we would be working at for the next 4 days. We took a quick tour of the village with our coordinator Justo and then enjoyed a delicious dinner cooked by our chef Ana before bed.
The next 4 days were filled with mornings of working on rebuilding the fence surrounding the primary school in order to make it more secure. We would spend 4 hours from 8am-12pm on doing a range of jobs including sifting rocks and sand, mixing cement, digging with shovels, concreting the bricks, weeding and more. The afternoons were spent either playing with the children of the school as well as various other activities such as tortilla making, friendship bracelet making and salsa dancing.
During the week we also organised with the overall coordinator of La Esperanza, Pauline, about what we would do with the $1200 we fundraised for the school. We decided to buy 2 new whiteboards, a range of stationary for both the teachers and students, and also contributed money to fixing the water pipes that supplied the school’s drinking water and donated the rest of the money to finishing the wall we had started.
Many of the girls made friends with the children of the school and played games with them such as soccer, piggy back rides, face painting, hairbraiding and clapping games. On Wednesday, the day before our departure, we held a raffle to hand out all the gifts we brought from home to Nicaragua for the children in the school.
After our work on the wall on the Thursday, we enjoyed our last lunch and then packed up and said our goodbyes to the community. We then got driven back to Granada, where we are now staying in the Colonial Hotel. Tomorrow we will be leaving early to catch the flight back to Houston, then Auckland and then finally Sydney and home. We’ll be looking forward to seeing all our family on Sunday morning at around 9am!
– Kirrali & Vivienne
Costa Rica & Nicaragua 