I graduated from college about a year ago and decided to take a year off from school while hopefully following through on some of my desires, dreams, goals. One of them was to live abroad for part of the year volunteering in Latin America and learning more about the many social issues that continue to have a huge impact on our world. Well, my dream was put on hold for a few months, then a few more months, but then finally, I quit my job and took off for Nicaragua!

I choose Nicaragua and the Nica HOPE Project of Fabretto for many reasons. I wanted to come to know where my family came from and I wanted to immerse myself in a complete learning experience in Central America's poorest country. Nica HOPE is a unique project that really believes in hope and change. It’s not just a band aid on the issue that may provide a livelihood for the day, for the month, or for the moment, but Nica HOPE equips the youth and families with sustainable ways to change the future of their children, family, community, and country. They serve the most vulnerable and needy - families and children from communities who live and/or work in La Chureca. These children and their families work in the trash dump trying to afford basic necessities by collecting recyclables, earning on average $2-$3/day. They live in homes made out of tin, plywood, and cardboard with limited electricity and water, if any. The children are often sick from the smoke and fumes produced by the burning trash and from the unsanitary conditions of living inside of a dump. Nica HOPE has helped combat these issues and have put many of these child workers back in school.

Nica HOPE began only recently, in February 2008, and has grown immensely since then. They provide school lunches to motivate the children to attend school, uniforms and school supplies so they can attend school, tutoring to keep them in school and ahead, and computer and jewelry classes to equip them with useful job skills. Moreover, in order to better serve the community through more consistent funding, they decided to become a project of an organization called Fabretto, which is also taking great strides in serving this country and community. Join this project in their efforts to provide these youth and children the supplies necessary to attend school and the skills necessary to move out of the dump and surrounding communities and grab a hold of a brighter future!

Any donations made will go directly to the Nica HOPE Project of Fabretto. I am not fundraising for my expenses, but only to help finance this important organization. Since I am coordinating their Child Sponsorship Program for the summer, many of the donations correspond with amounts to sponsor a child. These are the amounts necessary to provide a child with all of the services Nica HOPE offers. If you are also interested in sponsoring a child monthly, please visit the Nica HOPE website for more information or contact me. Check out their website at www.nicahope.org. For more information about my experience in Nicaragua visit my blog at www.nica-roots.blogspot.com. You can also visit the website of their parent organization to find out more about the work being done in Nicaragua www.fabretto.org.