Centro Juvenil Los Laureles de CISAS nació en el marco del proyecto de Empoderamiento de Niños, Niñas y jóvenes por un medio ambiente más saludable en Nicaragua, el dos de febrero del 2015 con el propósito de fortalecer capacidades de niños, niñas, mujeres, jóvenes y hombres de comunidades en riesgo social, por medio de procesos educativos que generen sensibilización análisis y critica a la rea
lidad en que viven, para gestionar soluciones y trabajo comunitario enfocado al mejoramiento de la calidad de vida. Nuestra visión es en el futuro ser un centro social facilitador de procesos educativos para las comunidades y pobladores que buscan soluciones a problemáticas en la autodeterminación y gestión comunitaria. Tomando en cuenta problemáticas sociales que trastocan las relaciones de la familia y la comunidad tales como la violencia intrafamiliar, el machismo, la desigualdad el cambio climático entre otros. Nuestro enfoque de intervención se basa en el trabajo integral con la comunidad para la solución de problemas por lo cual nos enfocamos en los siguientes ejes:
1. Promoción de los derechos humanos y enfoque de género, la prevención de la violencia y cualquier tipo de discriminación, desarrollo de una vida saludable y en equilibrio con la naturaleza.
2. Mejoramiento del liderazgo comunitario y facilitación de herramientas de organización y planificación el abordaje de problemáticas en las comunidades.
3. Crear espacio de reflexión y análisis para la identificación de problemáticas y búsqueda de soluciones a problemáticas sociales.
4. Crear espacios de capacitaciones y de recreación que promuevan el fortalecimiento de capacidades y habilidades en niños, niñas, jóvenes y mujeres de las comunidades. Nuestro centro apunta a mejorar las relaciones vecinales y la gestión comunitaria de líderes y pobladores, que puedan atender sus propias problemáticas, utilizando el centro juvenil como un eje de integración capacitación, socialización de las comunidades y las personas con el fin de mejorar su calidad de vida. Centro Juvenil Los Laureles was opened by CISAS 2nd of February, 2015. It was born out of the project “Alegremia”, which had the aim to raise conscious towards the environment in socially endangered communities. Since then we have been working with the community to improve quality of living, by offering educational and recreational activities to children, women and men. We accompany the communitarian development taking into account the severe difficulties such as interfamilial violence, machismo, inequality and climate change. Currently we are mainly working on 6 axes:
1. Empowerment of women in the community Los Laureles. We have regular meetings every Thursday afternoon, in which we do recreational activities such as dancing, sports, cooking classes or artistic activities. These activities are combined with more serious talks about a healthy diet, safe relationships etc. Even though the promotion of healthy recreation and education are two good side effects, our main goal is to have the women organize themselves and thus empower them to analyse and tackle the problems in their community. In the long term we want that the women take over all steps to organize the weekly meetings, from deciding which activities to do, up to carrying out the activities. One has to consider the difficulties the women face in the community, such as illiteracy, lack of education, economic difficulties, constant oppression by males etc. But still we had a considerable success since the initiation of this strategy in February 2016. We had several women teaching new dishes to the other women in the cooking classes and catching up an impulse from the women we were able to organise a party on Nicaraguan Mother’s day, in which the women prepared the food in a group effort. We still have a long way to go, but we believe this work to benefit the whole community in the long term.
2. Theatre group with children from the communities Los Laurelels and Amigos de Holanda. The idea of a theatre group with the children grew out of the realization that because of the teacher-centred teaching, the high number of children in one class and the insufficient infrastructure in schools, the children have very few opportunities to express themselves and develop social skills and self-esteem. The established group practises every Wednesday and Friday morning. We are currently preparing a theatre performance related to the topic “protecting the environment” and are planning to perform it in our community centre, as well as in the children’s school.
3. A third project is the reinforcement of basic skills in mathematics and Spanish. An established group of children with difficulties in school practise these skills every Thursday morning. We thereby hope to give them a chance to catch up to the level in their classes. We are also conscious that almost none of the children in the community can count on help by their parents in doing their homework. For this reason, we are offering them to stop by at the centre at any time to do their homework here, using our educational material and having our support.
4. Another activity on Thursday mornings is the girls football practise. Women are disadvantaged in Nicaragua in a lot of ways. To tackle this problem at its root, we established a weekly football practise for girls, in which they have the opportunity to participate in healthy recreation and develop self-esteem. At the end of the practise we sometimes try to include the boys to, but without our supervision this often ends in the boys bullying out the girls. In the long term we hope to establish a healthy relation between girls and boys from a young age.
5. Once a week there is the “Juegoteca”, to which all children can come to play in a safe environment. In this activity we also try to implement a sense of responsibility by letting the older children prepare and administer the distribution of toys.
6. We are part of a network, which is fighting HIV in Nicaragua. As part of this work we are doing workshops in schools and other institutions, to raise consciousness towards this issue and break down prejudices. Apart from these, we are organizing activities, which are realized less frequently, but contribute greatly to the development of the community, such as field trips for the children to volcanoes or botanical gardens. For more recent updates on our work please have a look at our timeline!
