The project came out as inspiration from one of Brigham Young University’s Spanish Professors, who suggested that the class do a service project together this Christmas season. Several students from different sections of the class came together Saturday at 11:00 am. They took supplies donated by students, faculty, and professors from other nearby universities and were able to assemble around 50 kits.

These kits include anything from notebooks and pens, toothpaste and soap, to T-shirts. They will be of great use to the youth with whom we will be working this summer.

Color my World was so grateful that people in the community rallied together to support our cause. This professor’s example is a reminder to us all that it doesn’t take much to make a difference. People will support causes they can believe in. We invite each of you reading this to find a way that you too can serve this Christmas season! Remember, it doesn’t take much to make a difference!

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We were a group of 30- all which we didn’t know before hand and yet, became family throughout the week. We worked hard and helped one another. Teenagers came from all different states and helped my younger boys- whether it was through their fine example of hard work and leadership, playing with them, inspiring them, or at times ‘bodyguarding’ them. The teenagers brought energy and strength to our projects.

We also had a few families join the group. We loved getting to know them. We had a young man that worked on his Eagle project as well as my own son. A generous donation was given to provide the first technology at the school in a small village for the kids and a beautiful basketball court.

We were blessed to work with such an amazing organizer for the group, Angela Hughes, who I will forever be grateful for. She and her family are a blessing and angels to the world. We also had Dan, who shares his passion to help others and relates so well to people help CMW. He was so fun to have and my kids still mimick his awesome British accent.

We love each person in our group as we built memories working side by side sweating and playing. We enjoyed our night time chats where we came together and talked about the day.

We started building some of the first houses in a small village for families without homes, helped teach English at the school, feed lunch to the village and played with the cutest kids that live in some very poor areas near the Garbage Dump, visited the sweetest kids at an orphanage-who we quickly all adored from the first minute of playing with them, my son handed out hygiene/dental kits that the people loved, we built relationships with the locals and loved talking to them and hearing their stories.

We love each person we met as we worked and played side by side with them each day. They are the hardest working and most resourceful people ever. Our friends in Nicaragua blessed our lives and touched our hearts. We love them so much! We stayed at the most beauitful surf lodge, Monty’s Surf Lodge. We stayed in an awesome hut feet away from the ocean. Our lives have been changed, our hearts touched, and we will forever be grateful for this experience together.

Many times I wondered if this trip was for us- I wondered if I could really do this… Now, we are wondering when we can go back and feeling grateful to God for this beautiful world, beautiful children all over the world, and for giving us the opportunity to change our lives for the better.

Reflecting upon how grateful I am for God’s love, my family, the strength to get out of my comfort zone, the blessing of meeting such amazing people in my life and for the opportunity to go to Nicaragua with Color My World Kids. What a special experience for our family. One we will treasure forever in our hearts. We love our friends in Nicaragua and Color My World! Thank you for such a beautiful week.

{Written by Diane Ferre}

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Brotherly love in abundance was extended by 13 local residents that visited Central America as a part of a 29-person group that recently undertook a goodwill tour to rural Nicaragua. Twelve were from Bedford. One was from Amherst.

The tour, from Aug. 5-12, was presented by Color My World, a Bedford nonprofit with the mission of “leading a global effort to relieve human suffering by providing emergency response relief items and humanitarian services to those in need.” The CMW foundation was formed in 2000 by the Hughes family, of Bedford. It’s aim is to help young people experience service related activities.

The locals who went on the Nicaragua trip included Ella Garvey, 17, of Amherst, and Bedford residents McKenzie Willis, 15, Mattie Soghikian, 17, Lauren Grocott, 15, Maddie Grocott, 17, Griffin Lyons, 15, Will Toon, 17, and members of the Hughes family – Chase, 16, Elizabeth, 9, Noah, 13, and Hillary, 19, participants whose mom, Angela Hughes, and dad, Brian Hughes, led the group.

Those who signed up with Color My World through ColorMyWorldKids.org, visited places in Nicaragua where poverty is the norm. They accomplished a lot, including the removal of 32 bags of fish carcasses, plastic trash, rain-soaked scrap, rotten wood and other detritus from a town beach.

They tended a community garden. They went to the Los Zorros elementary school and served free lunches; meals prepared in advance and sponsored by Color My World. The school had no cooking facility, so the volunteers built a concrete-block kitchen. Then, they painted the building blue and white, the colors of the Nicaraguan flag.

There followed a giveaway of 50 donated solar cookers to local families. The volunteers, sustained on fish, rice, beans, chicken and fruit, also led workshops on how to use solar cooking to make healthy meals. Inhaled smoke from cook fires is of no concern when cooking with the pure heat from the tropical sun.

A stop at Casa Hogar orphanage, home to more than 20 children, led to a festive sing-a-long. Later, an emotional visit to the garbage dump at Chinandega jolted the volunteers. The visitors from New Hampshire observed people of all ages, elders to babies, living in and around the dump. In 1988, families were relocated there after Hurricane Mitch ravaged Central America. Two million homes were destroyed. Reports of 11,000 deaths – 9,000 of them in Nicaragua – were broadcast. The volunteers fed the people living at the dump. They played with children whose toys too often are filthy discards scavenged from the trash.

Chase Hughes, 16, a sophomore at Bishop Guertin High School in Nashua, said the deprivations are not met with anger but with gratitude for life. He said he was proud of the assistance the group provided. An additional conservation project entailed the release of newly hatched baby turtles into the sea. Every kid around watched, delighted, as the tiny turtles loped toward the churning foam.

“I felt the people were humble,” Chase said. “They were grateful for what they have and not upset about what they don’t have. They were happy for every day.”

Chase, who intends to be a dentist, said some people were ashamed to smile at photo time. Few earn more than $5 a day and funds rarely go toward toothpaste. The volunteers eventually gave away nearly 100 pounds of hygiene kits, each comprised of four toothbrushes, two bars of soap, two combs and two hand towels.

Chase noted that visiting the tropics offers many challenges. Mosquitoes are relentless. Bats fly everywhere. He said that, daily, hundreds of crabs the size of his hand hunted morsels on the beach. Seeing the crabs was “cool,” Chase admitted. A sand dollar washed ashore is one of his cherished souvenirs.

“The ocean was very warm like bath water but everyone went into the ocean to cool off,” Chase said. “That was a big thing – to go to the ocean. The trip was a life-changing experience with all the service you do and the joy you find.”

Angela Hughes, Chase’s mother, said that a CMW group is returning to Nicaragua, and also to Guatemala, in 2014. In the past 10 years, Color My World has brought solace to the victims of many U.S. disasters, including Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. It has sent relief kits to Chile, Haiti and Indonesia after earthquakes there. Hygiene kits by the score went to communities scoured by a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Two years ago, participants extended their range. They took solar cookers and hygiene kits to Costa Rica.

“The perception that people in Central America are lazy is not the case,” Angela said. “They leave at night to go fishing and if you see them during the day, taking naps on their hammocks, it’s because they’ve been working all night. It’s 24 hours to eat and live.”

She said the group’s immersion into a third world environment where there was no clean water for bathing, only salt-water showers, no technology, no social media and no convenience store less than an hour away was “an eye-opening experience.” The volunteers witnessed people living their lives in shacks. Hammocks were beds. The bathroom? Go in the woods.

“The kids who went on this trip were forced to interact with people,” Angela said. “It’s poverty at the lowest level you can ever reach. The kids were nervous there. They pushed through it. It went from, ‘Can I do this?’ to ‘Can I come back, next time?’ I just saw confidence grow every day.”

For more information, visit www.colormyworldkids.org. The Color My World motto is “Search inward, Look upward, Reach outward.”

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OKLAHOMA TORNADO DISASTER RELIEF

The woman’s Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in conjunction with the Young Woman’s Organization and the boys of Scout troop 650, Wolfeboro, held a working party on June 4 to put together hygiene kits to be delivered to the victims of the recent Oklahoma tornadoes. 55 kits were constructed containing soap, toothbrush tooth paste, combs, and hand towels. All the materials were donated by church members, friends and local businesses. Once assembled the kits were forwarded directly to the afflicted people in Oklahoma.

#hygienekits #disasterrelief #volunteer #humanitarian #youthprograms #colormyworld #tornadorelief #volunteer #mormon

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The 2013 Moore tornado was an EF5 tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma, and adjacent areas on the afternoon of May 20, 2013; with peak winds estimated at 210 mph (340 km/h), killing 24 people (+1 indirect fatality) and injuring 377 others. The tornado was part of a larger weather system that had produced several other tornadoes across the Great Plains over the previous two days (including five that struck Central Oklahoma on May 19). The tornado touched down west of Newcastle at 2:56 p.m. CDT (19:56 UTC), staying on the ground for 39 minutes over a 17-mile (27 km) path, crossing through a heavily populated section of Moore. The tornado was 1.3 miles (2.1 km) wide at its peak. Despite the tornado following a roughly similar track to the even deadlier 1999 Bridge Creek–Moore tornado, which was similar in size and severity, very few homes and neither of the stricken schools had purpose-built storm shelters” –Wikipedia

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]]> 1710 https://colormyworldkids.org/bedford-family-helps-nicaraguans-with-solar-cooker-project/ Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:27:41 +0000 http://colormyworldkids.org/?p=538 Bedford family helps Nicaraguans with solar cooker project By KATHY REMILLARD Union Leader Correspondent BEDFORD – Global community service is not a new concept to the Hughes family – in fact, they established their own foundation, Color My World, to support it. “We started off as a means to distribute hygiene kits,” said Angela Hughes,...

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]]> Bedford family helps Nicaraguans with solar cooker project

By KATHY REMILLARD
Union Leader Correspondent

BEDFORD – Global community service is not a new concept to the Hughes family – in fact, they established their own foundation, Color My World, to support it.

“We started off as a means to distribute hygiene kits,” said Angela Hughes, director of Color My World, which included toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap and towels to donate to those stricken by disaster, both here at home and abroad.

The foundation began to branch out even further when Hughes’ son Chase introduced the concept of solar cooking on Color My World’s first mission trip to Costa Rica in 2011, which takes advantage of the sun’s rays to produce cooking heat.

The cooker is similar to a crock pot, Hughes said, and requires about 12 hours of sunlight to run effectively.

“We’ve traveled all over the world,” Hughes said. “One of the biggest problems people have is that they have to go search for their wood and chop down trees to cook every day.”

When the family went to Mexico in December, they again saw people hauling wood on bicycles to bring back to their villages, and remembering their solar cooker project, decided to take action.

Hughes did some research and chose Jiquilillo, Nicaragua as the location for the family’s next philanthropic adventure, and they spent a week there at the end of February.

“I took a risk,” Hughes said, knowing that they’d never traveled to the country before. “We headed out the door hoping to meet the right people, and we did.”

The family – Angela, husband Brian, and three of the couple’s four children, Chase, Noah and Elizabeth – ended up staying at a lodge owned by Gerry Caseres, president of the citizens conservation committee in the town, who offered to help them get set up.

“He helped us put together our audience and our Spanish translator, and facilitated the arrangements of our other projects,” Hughes said.

Caseras told Hughes that the project was more of a conservation effort than any health or medical project he could think of.

“We are cutting down more than 1 hector of trees a week (1,200 trees,)” he said. “My goal is to work with Color My World to bring in solar cookers to 2000 families in this community.”

Hughes said that while the cookers were successful, they knew they were also introducing a cultural shift, especially for women, who often spent all day cooking.

“We were cooking in a completely different way, and teaching a completely different way of life,” Hughes said.

The villagers also began to bake items, like brownies, and sell them to tourists.

“All of a sudden, people making 2-3 dollars a day were selling brownies at $1 apiece and making $20 a day,” Hughes said.

Villagers were left with templates and instructions on how to make their own solar cookers.

“You have to be sustainable,” Hughes said. “You can go and give people everything, but there is that ‘teach a man to fish’ principle.”

In a country where survival is a 24-hour mission, Hughes said such abject poverty made an impression on them.

“They don’t have anything,” she said. “It’s almost unimaginable for someone from Bedford to see those conditions.”

Still, the villagers were happy with what they had, Hughes said, and grateful for the assistance.

“You have to remember that people have dignity – they’re not just projects or photos,” she said.

The Hughes’ have committed to return trips to the area, and hope to track how many people continue to use the cookers.

The service work is a way of life for the family, and Hughes wants it to stay that way.

“Our kids have grown up with the foundation,” she said. “I want them to be humanitarians.”

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]]> 538 https://colormyworldkids.org/bedford-family-helps-nicaraguan-villagers-use-solar-cooking/ Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:02:52 +0000 http://colormyworldkids.org/?p=527 Bedford family helps Nicaraguan villagers use solar cooking By IRENE LABOMBARDE Staff Writer Imagine living in a shack without electricity, appliances or running water, where food is cooked indoors over an open fire. Most of your time and energy is spent cutting and gathering enough wood to fuel the fires just to feed your family....

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]]> Bedford family helps Nicaraguan villagers use solar cooking

By IRENE LABOMBARDE

Staff Writer

Imagine living in a shack without electricity, appliances or running water, where food is cooked indoors over an open fire. Most of your time and energy is spent cutting and gathering enough wood to fuel the fires just to feed your family. There is no time to learn a trade, run a business or engage in leisurely pursuits. Now, imagine how different life could be if there were an easier, safer way to cook that freed up your time and resources.

Angela and Brian Hughes, of Bedford, along with three of their four children, spent school vacation in February in Nicaragua doing just that. By providing solar cookers and water pasteurizers and teaching people how to use them, the family was able to change lives.

Established by the Hughes family in 2000, Color My World: Kids Who Care is a nonprofit organization leading a global effort to relieve human suffering by providing emergency response relief items and humanitarian services to those in need. Color My World is about helping young people get involved in service-related activities. Past projects have included providing hurricane and tsunami victims with hygiene kits and backpacks stocked with school supplies.

The organization was founded by the four siblings, Hillary, 18, currently in China and teaching English while learning Chinese; Chase, 15 a freshman at Trinity High School in Manchester; Noah, 12, who is homeschooled, and Elizabeth, 9, a third-grader at Peter Woodbury School.

How does solar cooking work?

Solar cookers have a reflective surface and use energy from sunlight. Within a few minutes, temperatures reach 100 degrees, and can get as hot as 300 degrees. Bread and eggs are easy to cook, and you can bake or roast foods for longer periods of time, like you would in a crockpot.

Color My World’s first humanitarian mission was two years ago, when Chase taught a solar cooking workshop to villagers in San Ramon, Costa Rica. The Hughes spent their 2012 Christmas break in Mexico, where they noticed, again, families pedaling bikes with carts of wood and cooking over open fires. At this point they decided to take action.

Why Nicaragua?

Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, behind Haiti. The climate sees temperatures and humidity both in the 90s. More than one hectare (1,200) of trees are cut down every week just for cooking fires, with very little replanting. Color My World ran a social media campaign to collect funds to pay for solar cookers at $25 each, and water pasteurizers at $10 each, with many people in southern New Hampshire contributing to the project. The family stayed in a fishing village on the northwest coast of Nicaragua, at their own expense.

Challenges

“Cooking over an open fire indoors in shacks not only causes health and lung problems, but people spend all day looking for trees,” said Angela Hughes, Color My World director. “Women often get raped or abused when they are in the forest looking for trees. They spend so much time cooking they can’t focus on building the economy, they can’t look for a job. Then there is the environmental issue. By cutting so many mangrove trees, the whole ecosystem is incomplete.”

Color My World enlisted the help of Gerry Caseres, president of a citizens’ conservation committee and co-owner of the lodge where the Hughes family stayed. Among other things, Caseres made arrangements for their audience and provided Spanish translation services.

“This project is more of a conservation effort than any health or medical project,” Caseres told Hughes. “This is clean energy 12 hours a day.”

Color My World delivered solar cookers and water pasteurizers to 40 families in Jiquillio. Hughes said there was a learning curve in getting the villagers to accept the solar cookers, because they had been accustomed to cooking over an open fire, and this is a radically different method. They also taught them how to make additional solar cookers using aluminum foil and cardboard.

Immediate benefits

“I was surprised how intense the sun was down there,” Chase Hughes said. “In the first five minutes of using the solar cooker, the pot we were cooking with burned my hand. They heat up to nearly 300 degrees and within two hours we had cooked rice. All of the women were super excited to take a solar cooker home.”

Within a few days of their training, several women made baked goods on the solar cooker and sold their brownies and cakes for a $1 each to the tourists at the lodge. They were able to earn $20 in one night, compared to the $1-4 a day a family usually makes in the work force.

“Solar cookers empower women,” Angela Hughes said. “They provide opportunities to improve not only their family finances but their entire family unit, providing them with a smarter, healthier environment to live in.”

Other projects

In addition to solar cookers, the Hughes family also helped establish a sustainable community garden. The land was cultivated and prepared for the upcoming planting season, with crops expected to include tomatoes, potatoes, onions, peppers and mangoes.

“Working in the community garden was some of the hardest work we did,” Noah said. “The ground was so dry because it hadn’t rained for months. We had to move cement blocks and weed ground that was hard as a rock.”

They also hosted a lunch at the garbage dump community of Chinandega, Nicaragua.

“There are people who live on the fringe of the dump to find food,” Hughes said. “Hurricane Mitch displaced many of them, and it’s a shanty town. There is free-flowing sewage, broken glass, and kids running around naked with no shoes, potbellied from malnutrition.”

The Hughes family also played baseball with local children, and provided them with hygiene kits containing basic items like toothbrushes, toothpaste, a comb, soap, and a hand towel. They hosted a lunch at the local elementary school.

“The kids have to walk to school from miles away in the heat and they don’t have a kitchen at school,” Elizabeth said. “We cut up potatoes, fish and rice and made them lunch, and then we sang songs and played musical instruments with them. I couldn’t understand Spanish, but we played a lot. It was really fun playing hula hoop with them and teaching them jump rope tricks.”

Long-term goal

Color My World is doing a case study to see what takes place with the new cookers and the knowledge presented. They are committed to bringing more than 2000 additional solar cookers to families in Jiquillio in the next few years, and would like to raise $5,000 to build a kitchen at the Los Zorros School.

Toward that end, Color My World hopes to invite local clubs such as Kiwanis Club and Lions Club to partner to strengthen the program to create a sister city in Nicaragua with Bedford. Community members would be invited to work and serve alongside Color My World in Nicaragua.

“Part of our goal is to help people move towards developmental travel,” Hughes said. “You can go places and have an impact.”

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]]> 527 https://colormyworldkids.org/hygiene-kits-donated-by-the-residents-of-flair-tower-in-chicago-il/ Thu, 13 Dec 2012 12:31:14 +0000 http://colormyworldkids.org/?p=1790 Humbled by the generosity of so many! More than 100 hygiene kits collected for the victims of #Sandy. Special thanks to James Cook who we just adore in Chicago, IL and special thanks to Becky Lawrence Kara Olson Colleen Darken Murphy, Ashley Wiszowaty and the Flair Tower residents! — at Flair Tower  

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]]> Humbled by the generosity of so many! More than 100 hygiene kits collected for the victims of #Sandy.
Special thanks to James Cook who we just adore in Chicago, IL and special thanks to Becky Lawrence Kara Olson Colleen Darken Murphy, Ashley Wiszowaty and the Flair Tower residents!
— at Flair Tower

 

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]]> 1790 https://colormyworldkids.org/girl-scouts-receive-honors-help-storm-victims/ Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:18:56 +0000 http://colormyworldkids.org/?p=1781 Read original article here in the Manchester Journal ARLINGTON – St. James Episcopal Church in Arlington hosted the awards ceremony for the Arlington Girl Scout troops on Sept. 16. Claire Grupe and Emma Sheldon were bridged from Daisies to Brownies, and Audrianna Ennis flew up from Brownies to become a Junior Girl Scout. The Juniors...

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]]> Read original article here in the Manchester Journal

ARLINGTON – St. James Episcopal Church in Arlington hosted the awards ceremony for the Arlington Girl Scout troops on Sept. 16.

Claire Grupe and Emma Sheldon were bridged from Daisies to Brownies, and Audrianna Ennis flew up from Brownies to become a Junior Girl Scout.

The Juniors who were bridged to Cadettes were Angela Caggiano, Anna Freebern, Florrie Hynds, Kierstyn Hess and Alyssa Harrington. They were welcomed by current Cadettes, Sofie Pedemonti, Katheryn Berger and Kaleigh Ward. The girls were presented with badges by troop leaders Janne Pedemonti, Elizabeth Berger, and Amanda Harrington, that they had earned over the past year. A special recognition was also given to parent volunteers; Elizabeth Berger, Kim Baker, Rose Caggiano, Julie Freebern, Stephanie Hynds-Moffett, and Janinie Moscarelllo.

The Arlington Girl Scouts recently organized a collection of hygiene kits for victims of Hurricane Sandy in conjunction with "Color My World" of
The Arlington Girl Scouts recently organized a collection of hygiene kits for victims of Hurricane Sandy in conjunction with “Color My World” of Bedford, N.H. More than 50 kits were collected and shipped to hard hit areas on the East Coast. (Courtesy Photo)
Cynthia Browning, a local state representative, was also recognized for her work with the Girl Scouts growing vegetables in the community garden in Arlington over the summer that were harvested for the food shelf and local schools.

The girls who bridged to Cadettes were each presented with the Bronze Award, the highest award given to a Junior. This distinction required that the girls develop an ambitious leadership project that would impact their community. Florrie Hynds and Angela Caggiano focused their efforts on pollution and recycling.

They did a workshop with Don Knaak of Junkmusic to use bottles caps and other objects to create musical instruments. They also made a wind chime, played games, created refrigerator magnets and stamps using bottle caps.

Florrie and Angela were also able to get the children at Happy Days Daycare in Arlington involved with playing games while learning about recycling. A petition of 75 signatures were collected and sent to the three top bottling companies; Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle, asking them to consider making their caps out of compostable material. The girls were able to raise the awareness of the importance of recycling in their community and were able learn a lot about it themselves.

Alyssa Harrington, Kierstyn Hess and Anna Freebern chose to create a gardening project at the Centers for Living and Rehabilitation (CLR) in Bennington. The girls worked with the local Garden Club gaining knowledge about planting for their project. At CLR, they cleaned and prepared garden beds, planted bushes and herbs. A butterfly and hummingbird garden was created for the enjoyment of the residents.

The girls gave a presentation on nutrition and explained the different parts of a flower. They created garden themed projects and celebrated the end of summer harvest with a garden party complete with a garden themed food, music, games and decorations. They were able to make a connection with the residents of CLR, fostered a relationship with the Garden Club and gained a great amount of knowledge about gardening.

The Arlington Girls Scouts also recently organized a collection of hygiene kits containing basic hygiene items. The girls coordinated their efforts with an organization by the name of Color My World in Bedford, N.H. more than 50 plus kits were collected and shipped to the hard hit areas on the East Coast that were effected by Hurricane Sandy.

The Girl Scouts would like to thank all that donated to this important cause.

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