Santa Rosa Fund Newsletter 38

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SRF Newsletter 38 November 2011, p.1

SANTA ROSA FUND NEWSLETTER

Registered Charity No. 1028085 Issue 38, November 2011

Supporting educational initiatives and projects in Nicaraguawww.santarosafund.org

a postcard for your friends

With this newsletter you will find theSanta Rosa Fund’s new postcard. Pleasepass this on to a friend or family memberwith a recommendation that they becomeone of our supporters.

We are grateful to Doug Specht, whoserved as a volunteer teacher at theschool in Managua in 2007, for thedesign and all arrangements for theproduction of the postcard.




El Viejo Youth Centre – a report

One of the projects funded by the Santa Rosa Fund through our partner organisation, the BerrizSisters, is the work of the Recreation Centre in the town of El Viejo. The centre is named as the‘Teodoro Kint Recreation Centre’ after a Dutch priest who used to work in the Cosigüina Peninsulaof which El Viejo is the municipal town. It is the major youth centre for the town and the municipalityand it is a significant feature of the Santa Rosa Fund’s support for education in Nicaragua. William

Vargas Díaz is the Director of the Centre and recently sent the following report of its actiities in and translated for our newsletter.

The following is a report of the activities which I carry out as Coordinator of the Teodoro KintRecreation Centre.

Adolescents’ Club

This group has been in existence for two years. It’s made up of boys and girls of 12 – 16 years old.They have educational sessions on four themes:

Sexual and Reproductive Health

Gender and Masculinity

Care of the Environment

Non-Violence

These are lively and participative sessions. Apart from theeducational sessions, there are also sports sessions in the afternoonsin which all are involved. This group is also actively involved inyouth festivals in which all of the other groups in the Centre areinvolved too. The club’s activities are assisted by youth volunteers

who meet every week to plan the specific theme for the week. The

majority of the group are male and for this reason one of our mainthemes is masculinity, which deconstructs the view that many menhave of machismo and relations with friends, girlfriends and family.

Monitoring the FAH Volunteers

(FAH is the Fundación de Amigos de Holanda – Dutch Friends Foundation, which has a long historyof working in the Cosigüina Peninsula and works in particular with our partner organisation, the

Berriz Sisters.)

This is the activity of organising the FAH volunteers (those in receipt of a grant from the FAH) in

various spaces: library work; with Casa Esperanza (aninstitution which works with people with learning andphysical difficulties); at the Recreation Centre itself; andin rural health centres. Monitoring of the work is donemonthly to ensure attendance and commitment

Youth Volunteers

This group is made up of young men and women aged 16 – 21, 75% of whom are in receipt of a FAH grant and arecompleting their social volunteering. The other 25% take

part under their own initiative. Youth volunteers aretrained in the same themes as those given above, with the same methodology, but more intensively.




Then they have to reproduce this information with other adolescents in different places such as:

Secondary schools – where they hold workshops and audio-visual cine-fora on those themes;currently they are working with six schools, one in the rural area, and dealing with more than200 adolescents.

Mixed sports leagues – these leagues were formedfor teams of court-football and volleyball that aremade up of both males and females with the idea of

breaking the common perception that men are betterthan women in sport. The volunteers hold specialseminars before the games at which these issues arediscussed. There are six teams in each league andeach team is made up of eight players.

Artistic and cultural events – dance, drawing andguitar groups, like the sports groups, have a seminarbefore their group activities where similarly positive messages are discussed.

There is follow-up to all these activities and half-way through and at the end of the year there is an

evaluation exercise.

Sports Leagues Organisation

From the start, the Youth Centre’s work has included the organisation of sports leagues. We play

court-football, volleyball, basketball and table tennis, some more popular than others. The leagues hadto be suspended while the roofing of the court was being done, but during that time other works, likepainting the new structures and reconstructing the stage for cultural activities, were undertaken.

We are hoping that by the end of this year we will get the leagues up and running again, and that nextyear we will have more leagues as a result of being able to start earlier and play for longer due to the

new roof preventing disruption from the sun or the rain.

Youth Festivals

We hold youth festivals to celebrate specific dates associatedwith the issues that the groups are working on, such asInternational Women’s Day, World Environment Day,

International Youth Day, Day of Non-Violence TowardsWomen, and the Day for Combating HIV/AIDS. Two of these five festivals are held in coordination with otherorganisations, but they all need to be planned and organised.

Links with Other Organisations

It is part of our strategic plan that we belong to networks of organisations which deal with the sameissues, such as:

REDMAS – the Network of Masculinity for Gender Equality. REDMAS works on issues of gender and masculinity and we take part in gatherings at which local action plans are made,such as campaigns against machismo. We also take part in workshops held for youthpromoters and these are mainly held in the capital, Managua.

The Nicaraguan Network for Democracy and Local Development. This network deals withyouth issues such as rights, participation, development, education, all within the Nicaraguanlegal framework. Again this involves meetings in Managua as well as local actions.




The Municipal Commission Against HIV/AIDS. This commission works at the local level topromote concrete actions (through workshops, cinema, educational events and the promotionof condom use) to prevent the increase in the number of people with HIV.

It is worth mentioning that my role in all these activities is one of planning, coordination and accompaniment to ensure the smoothrunning of these programmes.

William Vargas DíazCoordinator, Teodoro Kint Recreation CentreEl Viejo, Nicaragua26 September 2011

Computer use at the Santa Rosa School

Another report we have just received, this one from our partners at the Santa Rosa School in Managua, details the use of the computers that the Santa Rosa Fund helped to provide at the school.

The report was prepared by Mayra Calderón, the school secretary and one of the two members of staff to whom the SRF pays a small monthly honorarium ($15) for taking charge of computer use at the school. Translated extracts of her report follow.

At primary level, 56 pupils from the 6th gradeuse the computers. Secondary pupils also usethem along with the teachers who use them toprepare their lessons. Electronically we have anencyclopaedia, an English-Spanish dictionaryand now we have use of the internet through amodem which we got in the first semester of theyear. [The internet is now available throughmobile phone networks if you have anappropriate modem to connect to such anetwork.]

We now teach the use of Mecanet, Word, Excel,PowerPoint, and students improve their researchthrough use of the internet ... We believe thatthere is higher academic achievement as a resultof the use of the computers.

Students have computer classes twice a week during both morning and afternoon sessions.The morning sessions are held from 8 am to 10am. ... Darling Martínez [the second of the twoteachers with responsibility for computer use at the school] had to opt out of these duties inAugust because of her commitments to auniversity course. Her place has been taken byCarla Calderón.

Two new CPUs had to be bought early in theyear because of damage caused by the erraticelectricity supply, but the Ministry of Educationis promising to improve the electricity supplynext year.

Mayra identified three requirements for the

future functioning of the computers:

1. Two new computers are required toimprove the access of 6th grade pupilsand to extend computer use to pupils of the 5th grade.

2. Air conditioning to maximise the life of the machines.

3. Purchase of a suitable computer battery.




Dominique and some of her char es at Little Cob

More news from Nicaragua

Little Cob, Matagalpa

Matagalpa is in the mountainous centre of Nicaragua and isnow the home town of Dominique Olney, a French womanwho used to live and teach in Plymouth, Devon. Dominiquehas lived in Matagalpa since 2005 and in 2009 began theLittle Cob house on the edge of the town. Little Cob is asupplementary educational facility for Nicaraguan childrenand adults offering the kind of educational freedomunavailable to virtually all Nicaraguans, either at home or inschool.

At the time of printing of this newsletter, the trustees of the Santa RosaFund are currently considering the disbursement of funds to Nicaragua

for 2012. It is important that we meet our already existing annual commitments in full, but if thereis anything left in the pot after that, then Little Cob will be quite a strong candidate to receive asmall amount of funding (although it is important to stress that the editor of the newsletter is notattempting to influence the trustees’ debate – much).

Regardless of the funding issue, we intend to include a more informative article in the next issue of the SRF Newsletter. In the meantime, readers can find out more about Little Cob on its blog site – http://littlecob.wordpress.com/

Quincho Barrilete Association –

street children organisation

Our regular readers will be aware that in last December’s newsletter (No. 36) we ended an articleabout the street children of the Eastern Market in Managua with an appeal for any individual donorwho might want to help provide the equipment and materials required to turn the appalling hovel of a classroom that the Quincho Barrilete Association (AQB by its Spanish initials) was using to teachsome of the market children into an environment more suited to learning. (We had made the appealbecause at that time the Santa Rosa Fund had already committed all its funds for the forthcomingyear and was unable to help this particular cause.)

Well, the same anonymous donor who paid for the electrical installations under the new roofing of the Youth Centre in the town of El Viejo had £1,000 remaining from the estate that she was settling,and this went to the Quincho Barrilete Association specifically for the improvement of the EasternMarket classroom. After some uncertainty about whether the organisation could continue using theclassroom or whether it would be better to find an alternative room elsewhere, the AQB put the$1,500 from the SRF supporter to good use and have created a classroom with a much more suitableenvironment for learning.

The ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos are shown at the top of the next page. The ‘before’ picture doesn’t

show the rat-holes in the floor or the holes in the ceiling, but together the two pictures do illustratethe general difference.

http://littlecob.wordpress.com/






← BEFORE

AFTER →

SRF website The Santa Rosa Fund website still has a number of pages to develop, but thanks largely to Brad

Waters, we now have a website that looks attractive, is informative and receives a graduallyincreasing number of visits per month. It has recently received the following accolade from GillHolmes(*):

“ I've been perusing the SRF site and am impressed with the professional feel to it and the wealth of information. However, my main reason for visiting it was to find out how to go about officially

joining the SRF now I'm back in the UK (I know I'm an unofficial member as I always get thenewsletter) and how much it costs for unwaged or low waged people.”

The Fund is extremely grateful to Brad for giving his time and work on the website so freely. Bradruns his own website design business but donates the time he spends on our websitefor free. So in return we are happy to advertise his business for free – you canfind details of his company at

www.bradwaters.com

* Regular readers of the SRF Newsletter will know that until recently Gill Holmes lived and worked in Managua, the

capital of Nicaragua, and that she has acted on the Fund’s behalf on many occasions in the past and has featured several times in previous newsletters. This year Gill moved back to the UK to live and to work with her daughter Ana

Luisa in the Dorchester area. We wish them both well and thank them for all their efforts on our behalf over many years.

Receive our newsletter by email?

The Santa Rosa Fund believes that it is important that we continue to produce our newsletters ashard copies and the trustees are aware that many people prefer a hard copy even if they are a part of the virtual revolution. Nevertheless, there are certain advantages in receiving our newsletters byemail instead of by post:

First, you will see it in colour, and a number of those who are now on our email list have

remarked how different and attractive it is in colour.

http://www.bradwaters.com/






Second, we can reduce the cost of postage, thereby ensuring that an even larger proportionof the money raised by the Fund gets out to Nicaragua instead of being lost in administration

– although our regular readers will be aware that we are proud of the high proportion of ourincome which gets out to support Nicaraguan education.

If you would like to receive the newsletters by email rather than by post, please let us know bysending a message to our membership secretary Martin Mowforth at [email protected]

As well as our newsletter email distribution list, we also now have an e-list of people local to theWest Devon area who would like to be informed about SRF-related events in the area by emailinstead of by hard copy flyer. Again, this saves the Fund money, so if you are a West Devon-basedsupporter and would like to receive notification of events by email, please let Martin know.

Finally on the local supporter front, if you would like to support the Fund by

delivering flyers to addresses close by your own address, again please let Martinknow – 01822 617504.

More about the internet – but in Managua

Cell phones and internet access grow

In July this year it was reported that Nicaragua, the second poorest country in Latin America, had

4.2 million cell phones in use during 2010. The population of Nicaragua is 5.6 million and in 2001only 164,000 cell phones were in use. Cell phone service is now available in 151 of Nicaragua’s

153 municipalities, including those on the Caribbean coast.

The cell phone market is controlled by two companies, the Mexican company Moviloperating under the name Claro and the Spanish company MoviStar. Claro has 60% of the cell phone market and all of the internet service. The ease of access, however, is not

great as customers of one cell phone company cannot talk to the other and landlines cannot talk to cell phones. Because of this ridiculous situation, many people

carry two cell phones, one for each company; and this artificially increases thenumber in use.

Access to broadband internet grew to 400,000 users in 2010, a 300% growthsince 2006. During 2011, access to the internet has grown even more thanks toclever little modem which can be attached (by a USB link) to computers andwhich connects to mobile phone networks, which now offer internet access. Soafter all the deliberations made over the last few years by the trustees aboutproviding internet access to the Santa Rosa School in Managua, the school doesnow have internet access for use on the computers that the Fund and the BritishEmbassy provided in 2006.

mailto:[email protected]







Fund raising events

Ceilidh Night

On Saturday 29th October, the SRF held its first ever Ceilidh event. The six-piece Champion Band entertained us in the Mary Tavy Coronation Hall,

West Devon. About 50 people made the most of the night and afterexpenses the Fund raised a total of £303 through the entry fee and raffle.

We are very grateful to Liz Johnson and Jacky Rushall for organising theevent for us, to all those who made cakes for sale on the night and to allwho helped on the door and in the kitchen.

Renewal of support

Once again it’s that time of year when we ask our supporters to consider renewing their support tothe Santa Rosa Fund by sending us enough to cover the cost of postage of the two newsletters thatwe send out each year. And of course if you can manage a little more to find its way out to theprojects that we support, then so much the better. And many thanks.

With this renewal of support in mind, we enclose with this newsletter a subscription renewal form.

We are aware that about a third of all our supporters have standing orders in favour of the Fund, andif you are one of them, then please ignore this appeal and recycle the subscription form to yourtelephone notepad.

The trustees of the Santa Rosa Fund take the opportunity of the extra space at the end of thenewsletter to wish all the Fund’s supporters a very happy festive season and a successful new year.

We are extremely grateful for all the support you give to the Fund.

SANTA ROSA FUND CONTACTS

www.santarosafund.org

Chair: Pete Mayston, Rose Cottage, Tuckermarsh, Bere Alston, Yelverton, Devon PL20 7HBTel. 01822 840297 Email: [email protected]

Secretary: Jacky Rushall, Culliford House, The Down, Bere Alston, Yelverton, Devon PL20 7HGTel. 01822 841676

Treasurer: Pat Mayston – as for Pete (above)Twinning links representative: Rick Blower, Cloberry Cottage, Brentor, Tavistock, Devon PL19 0NG

Tel. 01822 810600 Email: [email protected] Membership secretary: Martin Mowforth, 51 West St., Tavistock, Devon PL19 8JZ

Tel. 01822 617504 Email: [email protected]

PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER

http://www.santarosafund.org/















Santa Rosa Fund Newsletter 38

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