Nicaragua's blog

Hello, my name is Leena and I’ll be the new Field Officer at La Bastilla for the next few months.

Having lived in London for most of my life I’m one of those oblivious city-folk that has very little idea of where my food comes from.

Yes, it  has finally started: the new school year! So the youngsters we told you about in one of the past blogs have left and made space for our students of the Agricultural Technical High School.

While for most of the 2^nd and 3^rd year students, life at the boarding school is simply returning to an already well-known routine, for 29 it is the beginning of an exciting journey.

We are proud to announce that one of this year’s graduates from La Bastilla Agricultural Technical High School in Nicaragua, Wilmer Paz, has been awarded a full scholarship to attend the prestigious EARTH University in Costa Rica.

This is a question that the students of La Bastilla Agricultural Technical High School are facing about once a month – the school is currently trying to consolidate their pig business, and the recent birth of 9 piglets gives us the perfect opportunity to enlighten our readers:

At the Colegio Técnico Agropecuario La Bastilla a 2 months holiday for the students doesn’t mean that all classrooms and the boarding school are closed up and left to the antsy Nicaraguan spiders. On the contrary, not only do students here spend 2 weeks out of 8 taking care of one of the production areas, furthermore every week 3 to 4 prospective students spend a practical week in order to see if they like the school and its hands-on approach.

As the school year is drawing to an end, the 15 students from 3rd year have now passed the last step on their way to becoming ‘Bachilleres Técnicos en Agropecuaria’*: the presentation of their final projects.

Long expected news from our Technical High School in Nicaragua are due. And we are very happy to tell you that the past month has been filled with exciting opportunities to acquire new skills: next to studying for their midterm exams students have participated in a range of workshops, from small, one-day meetings teaching them dining room etiquette to a 4-days artificial insemination course and a 2-days tour guide workshop.

After our great volunteer blogs, it is now my turn to take over. My name’s Christine, and I have just finished my first month as La Bastilla’s brand new Tourism Officer. My main tasks consist in getting our Ecolodge to realise its full potential and to teach the students the perks of working in the hotel and tourism industry.

 As we write this final blog, we sit in the computer lab that we set up for this incredible school that has been our home for the past month. The lab represents a large part of our work here and the impact we’ve had on the school. When we arrived, there were only two functional computers for student use and computer classes had to be held in a school twenty minutes walk away.

Hello there! We are Nicky and Steve and we are students from the USA who are volunteering with La Bastilla in Nicaragua for 4 weeks. We both study Computer Science at university and brought a donation of 7 laptops, in order to help the school here and also to teach the students some useful IT and Computer Science skills.