NICARAGUA PROJECTS-2011

Released September 19th, 2011

The family of NPH Nicaragua has started in May 2009 with the second phase of construction. We changed the design of the house and don’t work with the construction company anymore; instead, we decided to construct with a team of local construction workers. Some of our older youth are also helping with the construction. All these modifications brought the price per house down to 60,000 US$ including all indirect costs; such as supervision of construction, administration, security personnel for the ware house at night, transportation, communication, government taxes and the construction of small second ware house. With the construction of a total of twelve more houses we could move all children from the Island to casa Padre Wasson (at the beginning 20 children will live in each house). Right now, we are constructing four more houses that we will finish at the end of this year.

The children are very excited to be in their new home. However, we still need to work on several projects such as the electricity power lines for medium tension. At the moment we are helping us with a provisional connection that brings light to the homes and the kitchen and dining hall. But this connection will not allow us to use the walk-in freezers or any other bigger electrical machine (for example our bakery equipment) in the kitchen. We can also not connect the primary school building to this provisional line -and as it gets dark at 5:30 pm we will definitely need electricity for the afternoon classes once the school year starts in February! For these reasons the electricity project is the most urgent need here in Nicaragua. We need funding as soon as possible in order to realize the project in January 2010, before the school year starts. The project includes as phase 1 the connection of the "educational area" (workshops, primary and secondary school and pre-school), clinic, offices, kitchen and dining hall as well as the girls´ homes that were built in the last year and will be built in the future (a total of 7 homes). Phase 2 connects the boys´ houses (12 including 3 houses that are projected to be constructed in the future), the Babies House, the National Director´s House, volunteers ‘and visitor´s house, the chapel and the sport´s court. Two generators will guarantee electricity during power shortages. Generator One (for phase 1, the 4 girls´ houses that are connected to the existing electricity line and the water pump) is the emergency generator for all the essential installations that cannot be without electricity. Generator 2 will only be used during power shortages in the night. The generators will be imported from the U.S. by the company that installs the network. We will also hire an electrical engineer to supervise the realization of the project.

The workshops in our educational program are one of our most important areas. This is true for high school students not only in NPH but all over Latin America. For instance, in Nicaragua our workshop program opens doors and creates opportunities in the future for our students. But, specially help some our students who don’t have the capacity to go college and get a chance to learn a profession. For these reasons all of our high school students attend workshops when they are not in school. However, since we just moved from the island to our new home-land in Casa Padre Wasson we urgently need help to begin the first phase construction and build a new Carpentry and welding workshop for our children.

Thanks to the generous donation from donors the construction of new homes for our children at Casa Padre Wasson are well-ventilated and more spacious. The children are very happy living at the new dorms where caretakers and volunteers have been making their best for a successful transition. However, other important facilities still need to be done. One of the future needs will be to build a Transports spot. This area is like a big garage where all mechanical and electrical problems from the NPH vehicles gets repair.