Goal Tres

I mentioned that there were four goals I had to accomplish over my 11 weeks of training in Niquinohomo, and its time to reveal goal numero tres: establish a youth group in our pueblo.

It seems pretty straightforward, right? Get together a group of kids and play around with them on a weekly basis, just another step towards eventual community integration. With my experience in YG it seems like it would be a piece of cake. Not quite. Our youth group of course needs to have a business spin since I’m in the small business sector. More specifically an entrepreneurial spin, or as we refer to it in Spanish, “endprendedurismo”. This is a word the Peace Corps essentially made up, because the concept of an entrepreneur didn’t really exist in Nicaragua prior to our arrival. What are end goal with the youth group is to create a product or service from local resources that the kids can market and sell to their peers and members of the town. Every group of aspirantes in each town, including the agriculture aspiratnes, has to create this group. At the end of the 11 weeks, we bring all the kids together to face off in a competition, to see which group has the best, most feasible product. The idea is that each group creates a product/service that betters their community, and creates essentially a small business that the kids can continue after we leave. It’s a tall order but we have high hopes for our kids.

As of now, we’ve had two meetings. We had an aggressive marketing campaign, consisting of putting up papelogrofos (posters) up all over the hot spots and schools in town, and even got permission to talk to a couple classes at local schools. The work paid off, almost too well, we have had 15+ kids have shown up at each meeting! That’s a staggering amount of kids, considering that most other groups have 6 or 7, and numbers typically drop off after a the first week. We’ll see if the participation keeps up, and I have mixed feelings about such high numbers. It’s great that so many kids want to learn about this stuff and are enthusiastic, but at the same time, its tough to occupy that many kids in small scale product. But who know maybe it will work out for the best, and time will tell. We take things week by week. Week 1 consisted of listing all of the resources in town, and week two was listing out the skills they had and coming up with product ideas to think about for next week. Next week is a big one, we’re figuring out what are product is going to be! It’s just our first step on the road to winning the competition.

Here are some pics of the Niki aspirantes and our grupo de jovenes at our first meeting:

                     Chalin helping the kids out with their Community Map

      Michelle asking some questions about the places they visit on a daily basis

Cassi explaining the importance of our first activity and meeting