You are here:

Strength within the communities

Ana Maria Guttierez on a horse in the community of Cerro Bonito [Marcella Haddad]

CAFOD supports community development in poor rural areas of Nicaragua through housing, health, education and water projects. [Marcella Haddad]

Ana Maria Gutierrez started working with the John XXIII Institute after Hurricane Mitch, and quickly realised the potential for developing whole communities after a major disaster

Ana was inspired to help those affected by the huge hurricane in Cerro Pando, a region in the west of Nicaragua, where 2,500 people had died in a mudslide.

She says: “Three communities where I was working disappeared in Hurricane Mitch and a lot of the previous work was washed away,

“But the important thing was that people were organised. If we hadn’t known anyone there it would have been more difficult.

A house can be taken away but with their strength and ability people can rebuild. That cannot be taken away

Ana Maria Guttierez, John XXIII Institute

“Our work is not just about building houses, it’s about developing people. It’s about how they are organised to do things with us or without us.

"Before we were trying to make agriculture more productive, now we’re working to make the people more productive."

When the John XXIII Institute starts working in a community, they bring everyone together to analyse their problems and form groups interested in issues such as housing, water, health and education.

Education, education, education

Education is a key part of this work, as the national level of education is low. Before John XXIII Institute put a library in the community, there was not one dictionary in the whole place.

Ana says: “People need to be able to read and write, to count and calculate, to analyse their use of resources – for example, to record how much water they use and how much money they make selling it.

“Now they can send a letter to the mayor or speak for themselves and ask for the things they need, so we also teach them laws that protect them so they know their rights.”
Ana Maria values the time she spends working with communities, and says learning is a two-way process because people who have nothing always want to share whatever they do have.

“If ever I get cut off here because the river is too high for me to get home, I always have more than enough places to stay!

“People today are individualistic. It’s a consumer society. Consumerism is a silent propaganda. There are different worlds, different realities, different conditions that are sometimes difficult to understand.

“Cerro Pando was a community without hope. The land was so dry and hard, they would never have believed it possible to get water there. Now they have water, they believe they can do anything.

“I would ask CAFOD supporters to try a little to put themselves in the shoes of someone else. It is important to increase people’s standard of living – but it is more important to change people, to understand how we can do this.”