Sue Ellen Wortzel, Irv Wardlow, Lissette McRea

From June 4 – June 12, 2009 we piloted TALICA's first U.S./Nicaraguan Educator Information Exchange.  We are proud to announce it was a huge success. Georgia teachers, Lissette McRea and Irv Wardlow, participated a week-long learning journey to the villages of Balgue and Madroñal, Ometepe, Nicaragua. 

TALICA placed teachers with two local families.  These families opened their homes to us and gave U.S. teachers the enriching experience of living along side Nicaraguans who live on less than $3 per day.  TALICA received positive feedback from participating families and teacher volunteers have not yet stopped telling wonderful stories about their home-stay experiences. 

Lissette helping Dilana.

The Information Exchange was extended also into public schools. We spent a couple of days with the Primary Schools of Madroñal and Balgue, currently TALICA partnered schools.  We observed and participated in a first grade reading class and a third grade math class.  U.S. teachers saw first hand the impact of the TALICA supported book collections. Each child had reading material which supported reading instruction, as well as books to read for pleasure.  Teachers had materials to enhance instruction.  As a side note here, it is hard to explain what the classes were like before TALICA’s work began.  Before there was not one book in some schools, not one book in front of one child for the entire day.  All work was done from the chalk board where students copied and completed tasks in notebooks. 

Shared Reading with first graders and teacher Irma Valle.

As we observed and helped with students, we started to see how important our books really are in this school.  During recess, Nicaraguan teachers had many questions about schools in the United States.  They started a powerful dialogue that illustrated that even among the vast differences in resources, we have very similar challenges in public education:  How do we keep students motivated to stay in school?  How do we engage parents to be more involved in the education of their children? This reinforces ever so well, that we are much more alike than different.  Only with face-to-face experiences such as TALICA’s Information Exchange can we ever come to believe this to be true. 

Irv and Lissette visit Café Infantil for a morning of reading with kids.

After the day was done, the three of us would sit and try to make sense of all this new information. Lissette, Irv and myself now have a better understanding of how it feels to be in a culture that might not understand us or our values.  We understand how it feels to eat different foods, use bathroom facilities that don’t at all look like our own and sleep in places that don’t always offer the best night’s sleep. 

We have started a very important discussion that is still going on about how this experience will help us be more empathic to the new immigrant families that come to our schools each day. We don't see a lot of empathy in today's schools. One can't "teach" empathy, one must live it, smell it, feel it. TALICA's Information Exchange offers that.

I would like to note that not only was this trip intellectually beneficial to us and Nicaraguan educators, TALICA found it supported its library programs immensely.  Each U.S. teacher helped raised funds that went directly into the purchasing of additional books for our library projects.  Also these participating teachers raised funds to fund airfare and the stipend for their home-stay families.  They went way beyond the call of duty and TALICA thanks you, Irv and Lissette, and TALICA awaits your return next year!!