Garden of New Collaborations

Health promoter Abraham and volunteers from the Nueva Vida secondary school planting oregano in the medicinal herb garden.

Last Friday, the national environmentalist movement, Guardabarranco, came out to the Nueva Vida Clinic with 40 young volunteers and planted 150 plants to reactivate our medicinal garden.

We had just finished our first-ever Fall Fundraiser. Our goal was to raise $50,000 and not only did we meet that goal, we surpassed our goal by raising just over $70,000! Sarah did the final tally and gave us the news shortly before the garden activity at the clinic, so it felt to me like an especially poignant moment of collaborative effort creating progress.

Increasing clinic sustainability by rehabilitating the green pharmacy garden is part of our 5-Year Plan, and here we were, just having successfully completed our fundraiser to help jump-start the next five years, already making visible progress toward completing our goals.

Before and after: Health promoters tackled the weeds to clear out the garden before planting. L-R: Erika, Nora, Rebeca, Elizabeth, David, Domingo & Silvio all helped in this effort.

Our once-vibrant garden used to be maintained by a rotating cast of foreign volunteers who made tinctures and natural cough syrup for sick patients. In recent years, however, the garden has languished: we’ve received fewer volunteers from abroad and our local staff and volunteers have been too busy filling gaps left by lack of funding to dedicate time to the garden. Now, we’re ready to change that.

As the students and young people gather and begin digging holes for the plants, I’m chatting to our health promoter Abraham, who is part of the Guardabarranco movement and took the initiative to get the plants donated to the clinic garden. He introduces me to the group’s national representative who asks me about how we got started working in Nueva Vida. I tell him we always work with communities to help them carry out the projects that they themselves develop.

“Sustainable community development, it’s called,” he says, nodding. “I studied that. It’s a different model from the old development models where outsiders brought in their ideas and imposed them on local communities. It’s about listening to the people and responding to their needs.”

It’s funny to feel understood by this young man when I’ve spent decades trying in vain to explain the concept to first world funding organizations. As I watch the easy collaboration among our health promoters, local high school students, clinic patients, and young environmentalists working together to transform our bare dirt into a fertile garden, I recognize that they are a living embodiment of this different development model. They are collaborating together for the good of the whole…they are a community.

Our Fall Fundraiser has felt like a community too: Board members, Brigade leaders, long-term volunteers, major donors, monthly donors, and hundreds of people who faithfully read our newsletters, blogs, and social media posts…all of us working together, all of us very much a part of the work happening in Nicaragua. And of course, folk continuing to spread information encouraging ongoing donations.

Thanks to your help, we’re now planting a garden of new projects and new collaborations to improve lives in Nicaragua - both metaphorically and literally!

Thank you for being a part of our community. Thank you for sharing the dreams of the Nicaraguan communities we work with, thank you for sharing your resources to help them meet their goals. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

— Becca, for all of us.