By Susan Frisbie
Marketing and Development Director
In 1986, just two years after its founding, WCCN helped the citizens of Richland Center, Wisconsin, a town about sixty miles northwest of Madison, initiate a sister city relationship with the municipality of Santa Teresa, Nicaragua. Since that time, the Richland Center-Santa Teresa Sister City Project (SCP) has focused its efforts on providing agricultural, medical, educational and environmental aid, primarily in the region of Chacocente, an extremely poor area situated on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua. Recently, their work has begun to focus on establishing social and economic development programs. These programs have helped not only in improving the quality of life of the Chacocente residents, but have also provided sustainable income-generating skills and know-how that are greatly needed in an area where earning income from collecting turtle eggs and slash-and-burn agricultural techniques have traditionally been the norm.
The SCP is reaching one of the most underserved populations in Nicaragua, and the ecosystem is one of the most unique and fragile in the country. WCCN is proud to continue its relationship with the SCP and has recently begun partnering with them on their Adopt-a-Village Program, which is aimed at reducing inequality of opportunity for the people of the region. In a recent interview, SCP President Derrick Gee shared a bit of the program’s history and plans for its future.
Why has SCP launched the Adopt-a-Village program?
It was in the year 2000 that the mayor of Santa Teresa, José Martinez, asked us to focus our limited resources on helping the five, small, remote villages in the Chacocente Wildlife refuge. One of our members, Peter Smith, spent over two years living in the communities, learning their culture and their issues. We could see the need for cleaner wells, latrines, more and better schools, a health care system and sources of income that were more compatible with preserving the fragile ecosystem in which the people lived. Our big task back then was to raise money and establish a structure to “help the people help themselves.” We leaned on our community but also on friends and family all over the United States to donate to our cause. We kept our costs down by sticking with an all-volunteer structure at the US end and by employing just two local people to facilitate the work in Chacocente. As WCCN members know, it’s often “two steps forward and one step back” in the “third world,” but overall, the project has worked very well and the villagers in the Refuge now have a somewhat better way of life. But there are another fifteen remote villages in the “buffer zone” around the Refuge that also need help. We are experimenting on the Adopt-a-Village program with our friends at WCCN as a way to raise funds for this expansion and to spread awareness of life at the subsistence level.
How will the program work?
We can launch our programs in a village for an investment of $4,000 to $5,000 a year for the first three years. In the very near future, we will be identifying an unserved village which WCCN will “adopt.” WCCN will provide the funds. SCP’s facilitators will assess the priorities of the community with the village leaders. Then the work will start. It may be to improve a school, or provide training in sustainable agriculture, or dig new wells. We get a lot done for few dollars because the village supplies all its own labor, we keep buildings very simple and we have almost no overhead. We anticipate that WCCN staff and tour group participants will visit “their” village and contribute suggestions or at least develop a first-hand relationship with the community.
What do you think will be the effect of WCCN’s collaboration with Richland Center SCP?
We are blessed to have WCCN as a partner to experiment on this new program. If it works, we will offer “Adopt a Village” to other organizations and individuals who would like to participate. We also believe that it enables WCCN to interact with a segment of the Nicaraguan population, the “poorest of the poor,” who are not yet ready to benefit from microfinance.
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