Santa Rosa Fund

Santa Rosa Fund, accounts to year ending 31.12.08

Interview with Miguel de Castilla, Minister of Education
By Karla Jacobs, November 24

At the end of November Tortilla con Sal had the opportunity to talk with the Education Minister, Miguel de Castilla Urbina, about the work he and his team have been carrying out over the last 22 months. De Castilla is a sociologist, educator and education administrator with vast experience in all three fields. He has published over 500 articles and dozens of books about the problems, achievements and challenges of education in Nicaragua and the region. He was vice minister of Education during the first sandinista government of the 1980s.

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On this second visit I was accompanied by Martin Mowforth, the Membership Secretary of the Santa Rosa Fund which is based in Tavistock, Devon. The Santa Rosa Fund has been supporting a school in the Santa Rosa neighbourhood (hence the name) in Managua for the last twenty years and more recently other educational projects in the El Viejo municipality in the department of Chinandega, west Nicaragua. The Santa Rosa Fund made a donation to Los Quinchos’ Chureca project through Wales NSC and given that Martin was visiting Nicaragua he was keen to see the project.

The following is a translation of a report we received from Sister Lilliam Miranda in September 2008.

The community pre-school in Villa España now continues with teacher Verónica Treminio Alvarado. During this school year (2008) various difficulties have been experienced owing to the socio-economic reality of the country and the hike in the price of food. People are able to cover less and less of their basic necessities. For these reasons attendance at the pre-school has fallen off a little. At times mothers do not send their children to school because they don’t have clothes or because there is no food.

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Twenty years ago, the first steps were taken to establish a link between the Santa Rosa School in Nicaragua and Southway School in Plymouth, UK. Nobody envisaged then that those steps were the start of an enduring development organisation, the Santa Rosa Fund.

Read more in our November newsletter, click on Newsletters in the category below for more.

In May 2007, Virginia Gómez Guillén retired from her post as headteacher at the Santa Rosa School in Managua due to ill health – she had had heart problems for some years. Until that time, the Santa Rosa Fund had known no other headteacher at the school since the work of the Fund began in 1988. She was the instigator of everything which the Santa Rosa Fund had managed to do at the Santa Rosa School since 1988.

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James Watson was one of the Santa Rosa Fund’s volunteers in 2007, teaching computing to the staff at the Santa Rosa School in Managua. He returned to the UK to finish his final year at Sussex University where he obtained a First Class degree and during which he wrote this essay on the effectiveness of small non-governmental organisations in Third World countries.

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Nick Hoskyns has lived and worked in Nicaragua for many years and here offers his interpretation of the problems within the FSLN (Sandinistas).

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Chuck Kaufmann writes in ZMAG about how development workers and solidarity colleagues should interpret the current serious rifts and persecution within the Sandinista party in Nicaragua. He also writes for the Nicaragua Network Hotline.

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In 1998 Hurricane Mitch hit Nicaragua with devastating effect. Around the town of El Viejo 4,000 people were made homeless. About 1,000 of these were re-housed in a new settlement, now called Villa España, which was built by the Spanish Red Cross. Families moved into their new houses in 2003, over four years after Hurricane Mitch, having spent the intervening years in a temporary tented settlement.

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The Santa Rosa Fund has recently begun to support an educational project on Managua’s waste dump – La Chureca. The Wales Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign (Wales NSC) has launched an appeal to support the Los Quinchos Centre which is based inside the dump. The following brief extracts from Wales NSC Newsletter explain some of the background and needs of the project.

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The visit took place a few days after the protest by some of the families in La Chureca had come to an end. Organised by the Movimiento Comunal (which grew out of the Sandinista neighbourhood defence committees of the ‘80′s) they were refusing to let the council rubbish trucks into the dump in protest against the bin men going through the refuse and taking out the valuable stuff (tins, plastic bottles, metal and even paper) before the trucks get to La Chureca, thereby depriving them of the materials they sell for recycling. They said that the Mayor, Dionisio (Nicho) Marenco, should increase the bin men’s wages so that they didn’t have to augment them by ‘prepping’ the refuse. Nicho replied that even if he did increase their wages it was impossible to ensure the bin men didn’t extract recyclable materials. El Nuevo Diario said the protest was politically engineered by the government in order to discredit Nicho, formerly one of Daniel Ortega’s right hand men, who had been very public in some critical comments he made of the new government’s style. The newspaper said the government was holding the population of Managua to ransom over an intra-party feud which caused rubbish to pile up in the streets.

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