Pencils of Promise

Sixto Sanchez Preschool (Nicaragua)

Open: October 2011

Until recently, the Sixto Sanchez coffee cooperative was thriving.

The farmers weren’t affluent, by any means of the imagination, but by growing and selling coffee, and some additional farming of beans and corn, they were able to meet the needs of their families.  The cooperative was so successful, and the community so well-organized, that the non-governmental organizations that worked in neighboring communities never offered any assistance to the forty families of Sixto Sanchez.

This all changed in 2007, when disease struck the coffee harvest.  The cooperative lost its entire harvest, and was forced to take out a loan on some of its land, in order to survive until the following year’s coffee harvest.  Having almost finished paying back the loan, the community was anxious to start building a school for their children.

For the past 13 years, the children of Sixto Sanchez had been attending class in a community room, which was over 20 years old.  Some of the 45 students would walk up to a kilometer each way to attend school.  Besides being used for meetings and various other activities, for which class is sometimes cancelled, the community room was used to store coffee during the coffee harvest.  At the peak of the harvest, the room could be filled with up to 40 100-pound sacks of coffee, crowding the students and teacher.  The roof and the windows were leaky, and the floor was cracked and uneven.  Because there were no windows that open, it was quite dark, making reading and writing quite difficult.  Also, there were no latrines at the school.

This project was conducted in partnership with Seeds of Learning.

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