Saint Joseph Regional High School

Standing apart from the shy 10-to-14-year-old children gathered in a small one-room schoolhouse in the hills outside of Cuidad Dario, Nicaragua, a young girl hazarded an answer to the first question posed by the gringo outsiders.

As part of an exercise in cultural sharing between the United States and Nicaragua, between the first and the third world, the American volunteers asked the young students

“What is your favorite thing about your country?”

The girl waited for a teacher-assisted translation into her native Spanish, reflected for a moment, and replied with a confident smile, “la escuela.”

Saint Joe’s Alumni Jim Burns ’67, Chris Burns ’07, myself and eleven other volunteers took our malaria medicine and left the United States for uncertain plumbing, undrinkable tap water, mosquito netting around our beds, and the heat and humidity of the Nicaraguan rainy season.

We were many things - laborers, backpackers, adventurers riding in the beds of pickup trucks and trying drinks made of corn and cocoa, and teachers.

But most of all, we were students.

We learned humility as we accepted the leadership of construction manager Dimas and the children who arrived at the worksite in rural El Cacao each day, sometimes on horseback, always neatly-dressed in white and blue school uniforms, to work side-by-side on a project that would give them a chance to attend school past the 8th Grade.

The students were eager and proud to show their American counterparts the right way to dig foundations, mix mezcla, twist rebar for the school’s earthquake resistant columns, lay straight rows of bricks, and affix them firmly to the binding cement.

But as host and Seeds of Learning Founder Patrick Rickon told us, the mission of the week-long trip was not just to help purchase materials and erect the three-room high school.

“People always ask me ‘Have I done enough?,” recalled Patrick the night before we began our daily expeditions to the site, “And I ask them back, ‘Have you learned the names of the neighbors? Have you played soccer with the kids? Have you shared a piece of food or a laugh with one of the workers?’ We aren’t just here to build a school. We are here to work together to solve problems.”

We learned this and other wisdom from Patrick, an ex-patriot of the United States who visited Nicaragua in the late 1980s as a translator, became moved by the plight of its youth, and never looked back. Today, he is married to a Nicaraguan and raises his two teenage sons, who are dual citizens, in Dario. He serves as program director, spokesman, guide, and more for Seeds of Learning and its small staff of educators. He is the cultural bridge between two worlds, and, as one who keeps his groups’ travel itineraries in his own worn notebook, routinely follows e-mails from the United States Consul General, lifts the hoods of fleet vehicles to check their engines, and can negotiate the special dinner needs of visitors in perfect Spanish, he is also the example of how a global nonprofit should be run: authentic, aware of its past and intent on its future.

“Even an ambitious, academically-gifted student couldn’t just leave Nicaragua to study in another country like the United States,” Pat said one day on the worksite. “They wouldn’t be ready with a high school education. The level of work would be overwhelming. We are trying to break the cycle by supporting the school system. It may take more than a generation, but we are hoping to turn things around.”

One of Seeds of Learning’s major moves forward is the SOL Learning Center in Dario, which augments public and private schooling with instruction in the trades and a vibrant arts program. The SOL library contains more than 3,500 books available for research by students from the lower grades through University, as well as a technology center with Internet access being used, among other things, to communicate with international sister schools. Older students, on scholarships to provide for their clothes and school supplies, work as interns to learn the use of SOL’s growing academic resources.

They take what they learn with them into their homes, many in barrios, isolated urban districts, or campos, farm communities.

It was with Pat and our group leader Bill Paolino, while bonding during sweat equity, cramming in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser, and savoring nightly meals of beans and rice, fish from the Pacific coast, and friend plantains, that we learned the greatest lesson of all: how the systemic ills of poverty cannot be easily treated.

As we showed pictures from our homes and played Frisbee and futbol with the children, Pat reminded us not to give away toys and gifts, which leads to schoolyard bullying and nurtures a sense of paternalism from the first world. The same lesson applied to our day in the Massaya marketplace, where shoe shiners, palm shapers, bootleg DVD merchants and a child trying to sell bottles of honey all descended upon us.

“We try to encourage groups not to just empty their pockets of spare change when asked, because when they leave, who is left to provide for people who cannot provide for themselves?,” Pat said. “Whenever possible, I believe in giving people a hand-up instead of a hand-out.”

Officially registered as the “New York City Group,” ours was diverse, hailing from post-Katrina New Orleans, the Mid-West, North Carolina, and Bergen and Rockland Counties. We had among our ranks teenagers who will write about the experience during the college application process, and adult professionals who believe deeply in getting their hands dirty and exposing their own children to vacations memorable not for their luxuries, but for the lives they affect.

Although we took many medicines, there is no prescription to be written for exposure to Central America’s second poorest nation, a place where desperate soda and cerveza storefronts spring from the backs of houses, where the handful of wealthy isolate themselves on islands and behind wrought-iron gates, where open, generous people with a sincere desire to work face weak or nonexistent infrastructure, lack of opportunities, and lingering economic exploitation by developed nations.

But Pat and the several groups each year that visit his dream, whether bound together by geography, familial ties, or matching t-shirts, share a common purpose in helping to improve the outlook of Nicaragua and its children, one lesson at a time.

The Seeds of Learning school-build concluded a two-year Container Drive program at Saint Joseph Regional High School. During the program, which was run by the Burns Family, William Paolino, and volunteers from the Saint Joe’s student body, more than 250 boxes of relief items were gathered and sent to schools and orphanages throughout Nicaragua.

To inquire about future donations, please contact Bill Paolino at bpassets@aol.com or Jeff Fucci at jeff.fucci@gmail.com. To learn more about the work of Seeds of Learning, visit www.seedsoflearning.org.