Working with Carmen Davila, principal and Mayor, and the neighbor to the school, a long-term position can be created together with housing to be able to sustain various education coordinators who come down from the North, of which I will be the second on nutrition, five feet from the school to help with security at night for the site.

(Last year Rebecca Carsova went down from the University on North Carolina, thank you Rebecca for your wisdom and grace in helping with nutrition programming for the preschool.) 

We are planning on paying the neighbor $35 a month for use of the room on-and-off as needed, and giving her bottles of good cooking oil, in addition to creating a small garden on property to help her food efficiency.  This could be used as a base camp for future facilitators as the plan continues and expands with the addition of the larger garden. 

I do not see myself as the only facilitator or coordinator with the project, I see myself as first in hopefully a long line, as volunteers perhaps from PIECL and Eco-literacy become interested in using the school as a place to shape ecological science curriculum around gardens.  Also we are looking to create further involvement with the Foundation for Sustainability with whom Rebecca worked last year, as well as connections to Green Empowerment, the small hydro-electric organisation also out of Portland, OR [PIECL, me.]

Carmen Davila's sister is on the Nicaraguan Parliament (see link below) the hope is eventually that the school garden will be successful enough to be implemented in other schools in the district as well. The first step will be to create a background file on the project and present it to Senator Irma Davila as a way to increase nutrition of school children in the area.  Last year University of Iowa School of Nursing through Jane Thomas  worked with the preschool to monitor student nutrition of 50 students.

Also the school already houses a kitchen within which to host local volunteers teaching children how to properly cook and prepare vegetables so that they taste good to decrease reliance on store bought foods.  As well documented in “Traditional Diet and Health in Northwest Mexico” by Enrique Salmon in A People’s Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable [1]diabetes and heart disease increase with the adaptation of white starches and flours and lose of the traditional diet due to reliance on store food stuffs during plantation life under Dole Fruit Company (Nicaragua was the original Banana Republic under Theodore Roosevelt) and later the Somoza regime.  What has remained of this diet mainly consists of trees and roots which grew in the area without assistance such as Yucca and plantains, due to the inability to own or maintain land in plantation life, however one could secretly gather roots on a hillside regularly, or gather from a particular tree without letting others know the value of the area, many families hid secret food sites to their members, but such food stuffs, as all over the world have become seen in an increasingly derisive fashion by young people anxious to have market goods.  To such an extent that people will sell their land for $50 to eat “good” for one month on market goods, and then starve. 

Also a well just for the school site through Provendac must be developed if this has not already happened (Natasha said several new sites were dug, but unsure if school has yet received one,) which could also have a PVC pipe to a wash station nearby to bring more community attention to the health and well being of the children.  Natasha says and clinic reports confirm that many children die of dysentery mostly as parents are slow to respond until conditions are so bad there is little that can be done.  Greater vigilance over children may help.