Help Us Build a School Library in San Nicolas!

Thanks to a generous donation from Akron Mennonite Church, Davie's home church, and donations from various friends and family towards our Balls and Books projects, the San Nicolas high school will soon have its very own mini-library.

A few months ago when we received close to $2000 from Akron Mennonite to spend on sports or books-related projects in San Nicolas, at first we were baffled. With such a large sum of money, any number of things now became possible for the Instituto Publico Carolina Camas Arauz, the only high school in the entire San Nicolas municipality. So we went to Idalia, the principal of the school and our good friend, and asked her what book- or sports-related projects she saw as being most needed.

The list, as we had expected, was long. The school needed world maps, textbooks, sports equipment, uniforms for extracurricular teams, book shelves, books to read for fun, sports lines painted on the court. On and on it went. But what underlay many of these needs was a simpler, if more expensive necessity: space.

The San Nicolas high school, which serves over 400 students from San Nicolas and more than 30 different surrounding communities, has five classrooms (one for each grade of school, from 7th-11th) and one multi-purpose room. This 8 meter by 8 meter room currently serves as the principal's office, teacher's lounge, storage room, library, snack shop, and part-time student hang-out room. Every surface of this room is cluttered with poster paper, volleyballs, stacks of file folders, mops, cans of paint, books and tons of other stuff. In one corner of the room, you can't even turn off the lights without climbing treacherously over a pile of old tents. The condition of this room is so ludicrous that it would be funny if it weren't caused by a serious lack of funding.

So when we talked to Idalia about what we could do with this unexpected gift that had suddenly been dropped in our laps, we decided that we could either buy more stuff to crowd into this room or, with such a generous sum of money, we could build an entirely different room dedicated completely to books. This will be a room where students can go to read for fun during recess or where they can use textbooks to study. It will also be a private space where teachers can go to have private conversations that they don't want students overhearing, or a place for the school counselor to discuss delicate matters with students.

When this room is built, it will also free up a lot of space currently occupied by shelves of textbooks in the multi-purpose principal's office. We hope this will revitalize this room somewhat, making it feel like a more professional environment.

Idalia is spearheading the plans for the mini-library, rallying parents to donate their time to help with the construction to reduce the cost of labor. The Ministry of Education also plans to donate zinc roof panels and the windows and doors for the structure. Idalia hopes to get the project going quite soon so that it will at least be started before we leave in September.

We're excited that we'll be able to leave behind something tangible in San Nicolas, but we also worry that the $2000 or so that we have at our disposal won't quite cover the cost of construction. We've seen many crumbling half-built buildings here in Nicaragua where only enough money was donated by some foreign entity to construct part of the building, after which the project was abandoned. We don't want this to happen. We want to make sure that enough money is available to make this building nice – to make it something that students will use for years to come. If you too feel inspired to make this San Nicolas school library a reality, please consider donating a gift of any size by scrolling down to our VMM profile on this page and clicking the second “donate” button that corresponds to our Balls and Books program. If you have any additional questions about the project, please email us at sarah.f.rich@gmail.com or davidjwiegner@gmail.com.

Thanks again so much to our family and friends who have already donated to this project! We will keep you posted on the progress made in the next few months.