Education

As of August 2009, there is good news to announce in education.  Nicaragua has been officially declared to be a literate nation!  That definition means a measurement of less than 5% illiteracy nationwide.  What a huge change in just the past few years!  In Ciudad Sandino, there are still shortages of educational materials and salaries for teachers, but many many more children are now attending school.

Why then an emphasis on education?

The education focus of the CDCA's work is towards people living in the "First World".  Volunteers who come to Nicaragua return home with their eyes opened to the realities of living in a developing nation.  Hopefully they return home with a broader outlook, a sense of world involvement and connectedness, motivated to live in response to that new larger awareness.  This education doesn't come just from the work of the CDCA, but rather from meeting and getting to know Nicaraguans, becoming friends and hearing their stories, learning from their perspectives and experiences.

The CDCA currently provides outreach and education and mobilizes resources by:

• Conducting two speaking tours in the U.S. each year since 1995
• Promoting arts and crafts from Nicaraguan artists for sale in the U.S. during speaking tours
• Hosting weekly visits by groups from other organizations, and annually hosting a dozen delegations and over 100 individual international volunteers at our International Training Facility
• Creating and distributing a quarterly newsletter to approximately 12,000 supporters (both by mail and electronically)
• Working in conjunction with other nonprofits in Nicaragua towards common goals
• Representing the needs and interests of the Nicaraguan communities with which we work at International meetings and forums.

And within the local work of the CDCA, education is provided in

• workshops and trainings for cooperative development
• health education trainings
• limited scholarship aid is provided to students
• limited assistance for teacher salaries in remote communities
• assisting in sister school relationships existing between a few U.S. preschools and Nicaraguan preschools

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