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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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/water-solar-cooking-in-nicaragua/ Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:13:23 +0000 http://colormyworldkids.org/?p=1835 We are in need of some crucial supplies from water pasteurizers $10.00 to portable solar cookers $25.00 to take to the village where we are headed! Nicaragua is the 2nd poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and many people we will be working with, are still living in “garbage dump” conditions after Hurricane Mitch devastated...

The post Water & Solar Cooking in Nicaragua appeared first on Color My World.

]]> We are in need of some crucial supplies from water pasteurizers $10.00 to portable solar cookers $25.00 to take to the village where we are headed!

Nicaragua is the 2nd poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and many people we will be working with, are still living in “garbage dump” conditions after Hurricane Mitch devastated the area in 1998.

If you are interested in going on one of COLOR MY WORLD’s next mission trips let me know. “Many hands make light work!”

P.S. We appreciate the support we received in our Hurricane Sandy Hygiene kit project that brought in over $30,000 in Hygiene Kits and Towels that we delivered directly to the disaster area.

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