Pencils of Promise

Santa Isabel Primary (Nicaragua)

Open: October 2010

Santa Isabel is a small community of 53 families nestled at the base of a large coffee plantation.

Six years ago, the owner of the plantation donated a parcel of land for the school, but until this year, the community had been unable to secure financing for the school construction. The building where the kids used to attend school is a small, dilapidated shack originally built by the plantation owner in 2001 to house seasonal farm workers. It has worn wood boards for walls, a leaky tin roof, a broken door, and a cracked, uneven floor. Without a sidewalk, it is always surrounded by mud during the rainy season. Because it has only two small, wooden windows, it is very dark and almost unbearably hot inside. Also, isolated at the very end of the community, it is quite far for some of the small children to walk by themselves which was detrimental to attendance.

Today, the children of Santa Isabel are excited about attending school. They have two bright and spacious classrooms in a central location. Because most of the men in the community work on the coffee plantation, the new school in Santa Isabel was built almost entirely by women—mothers, grandmothers, and sisters of the children who attend the school, of which they are really proud. The women are especially excited about the kitchen, because they will no longer have to carry heavy pots of steaming hot food over long distances to school. While the teachers are happy to have comfortable and secure classrooms where they can feel safe leaving books and materials overnight, they are mostly happy to have students who look forward to coming to school.

This project was completed through our partnership with Seeds of Learning.

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