Lives salvaged at barrio schools for Managua’s throwaway kids
In Nicaragua’s urban slums, children face the same handicaps of poverty, illness and educational deficit as their country cousins. But inner city kids face further risks from:
- Child prostitution
- Police Violence
- Substance abuse—an estimated 90% of all street kids sniff glue
- Gang warfare
As with rural schools funded by Connecticut Quest for Peace (CT Quest), our urban schools “begin where the pavement ends” in Managua’s crowded shanty barrios.
Give hope to students in Managua’s most dangerous barrio
Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, is a city of extremes. As the nation’s commercial and financial vortex, Managua boasts luxury hotels, state-of-the-art hospitals, sumptuous homes and fine restaurants. An elite few Nicaraguans and wealthy visitors enjoy the city’s segregated, attractive neighborhoods.
Managua’s slum barrios could as easily be a thousand miles away. In teaming inner-barrio lanes unemployed and underemployed men, women and children cram into hundreds of corrugated metal and cardboard shacks. With little or no electricity, running water or plumbing, the sewage-filled neighborhoods roil with chaos and violence. Two of Managua’s many volatile barrios—El Recreo and Reparto Schick—are especially destitute, drug-infested and terrorized by gang warfare.
Years ago, when the Sisters of Sion and Teresian Sisters determined to start missions in Managua, they were expressly warned to stay clear of two neighborhoods: El Recreo and Barrio Schick. Naturally, the Sisters of Sion chose El Recreo for their community center, Projecto Generando Vida—”Life-giving Project.” And the Teresian Sisters settled in Reparto Schick and built Colegio Enrique D’Ossó, a co-educational primary and secondary school that educates 1,325 students annually.
Your generosity to CT Quest supports both schools.
Help Nicaragua’s urban kids overcome drug addiction
The culture of addiction ruins lives around the world. Drug abuse combined with widespread poverty, culturally-accepted machismo violence and a dearth of educational opportunities—as in inner city Nicaragua—breeds a unique form of human suffering.
An estimated 90% of all Nicaragua’s street kids sniff glue. A well-known appetite suppressant, a tube of glue kills hunger pains—and is sometimes doled out by desperate parents unable to provide food for their children. The toxic fumes induce a reeling altered state many prefer to the grim realities of homelessness, hunger and physical and sexual abuse.
At Projecto Generando Vida community leaders partner with CT Quest to provide food, shelter, counseling—and to seek new solutions for this stubbornly entrenched problem.
“It is difficult work,” sighs Randy Klein, CT Quest coordinator.
Give a Nicaraguan child an education—and a future
Tell a throwaway Nicaraguan child you care. Support a year’s educational costs for one student at Colegio Enrique D’Ossó or Projecto Generando Vida. Donate $120 today.
Learn more about Managua’s gang culture. Read this important report from Centro de Estudios y Programas Interamericanos, a Ford Foundation-supported think tank.
Find out about Escuela San Ignacio di Loyola and Ibra, an eco-farming school funded by CT Quest.
Check out additional CT Quest humanitarian aid programs in Nicaragua.