News from our Mosaic!
At the end of the year we would like to inform you about our current events and dates (attached also with nice pics). We hope you have fun reading this newsletter and we would be happy, as always, about feedback.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your family from Proyecto Mosaico e.V.
Current events of the association:
Gracias Anouk!
In this Newsletter we would like to thank our co-worker Anouk very much for her loyal collaboration and wish her nothing but the best for her future and her family in Guatemala. 2003 Anouk came for the first time to Central America and to Proyecto Mosaico e.V., where she worked voluntarily since 2004, the first year in the information center of Guatemala. Between 2005 and 2013 Anouk was on the board of the association, and additionally as a staff member she took care of the coordination of the “weltwärts”-program. Anouk took a huge part in the development of the association and our local work! Thank you very much for all you help, Anouk!Stellenan
Membership at Proyecto Mosaico e.V.
We are always happy about new members, that regularly want to support our work. A membership is available starting at 5,-€/month. Every new member is for the first six months a sustaining member. Afterwards you can apply for a full membership and you will be invited to our annual general assembly. The switch from a full membership to a sustaining membership is possible at any time.
Fill out the Application for membership, print it and send it! For more Information, read our charter or send a Mail at kontakt@promosaico.org.
News from Central America:
Our CREW in Nicaragua
At the moment besides Mona as the volunteer-coordinator, we have Dominique (assistant v-coordination), Felix (PR), Maria (Group assignments) and Nadine (Fundraising, Project management) in our office in Granada. Additionally we would like to thank Veronique, who supports us from Germany by designing amazing, brand new posters. Overall, in 2014, we have had 19 Volunteers and Interns in the office to support us!
Thank you so much for your great commitment! As always, you can find our Team on our website. If you are interested in volunteering or doing an internship at the office, please have a look at our current Volunteering positions.Volunteer Workshop in Matagalpa
On November 15th and 16th, in the beautiful mountain town of Matagalpa (Nicaragua), we had a Volunteer Workshop. Our Office-Volunteer and social worker Dominique was the host of the workshop with overall 18 volunteers attending. Besides a happy Meet & Greet and a place for exchange it was important to us, to make the volunteers more sensible for intercultural and developmental topics, but also to support and develop the self-reflection process of the local volunteers. Sabrina and Sarah presented Proyecto Mosaico and its history and present day work. The weekend got closed out by a visit to Carlos, a Nicaraguan artist, who presented us his impressive pictures he painted with coffee extract. We were very happy with the motivation of our attendees a wish them an amazing time in their projects. Take a look at our pictures.Picture contest: „Oh how beautiful is Central America!“
What was it, which made your stay in Central America personally special?
We start a picture contest to find motives to print new postcards.
After a screening you can choose the winner on Facebook – the 5 photos with the most LIKES will be printed and the winners will get a set of the new postcards! December 5th is the „Day of Volunteer Work“. We want to celebrate you!
Without your energetic support it would not have been possible to have so much success in our Partner Projects and have so many positive stories to tell and make the lives of so many people a little better! Without you, Proyecto Mosaico wouldn’t be where we are today. We and our partner organizations are really thankful for your service!
To celebrate YOUR day, we wanted to know – why are you volunteers? What motivated to you to do volunteer work? Or looking back, what was a situation for you that got stuck in your memory, where you thought, that’s why I’m volunteering?
And there is this nice saying: „A picture says more than a thousand words“. That’s why several volunteers sent us pictures and we’d like to share them with you here.
EcoARTE & SamSam: Hidden Treasure
We had the pleasure to welcome the team of Samsam Magazine (“Together”) at Proyecto Mosaico e.V.. SamSam offers children (in The Netherlands) the opportunity to see the bigger picture of global issues and teaches them that we all together are responsible for a sustainable world. Even the smallest ones can have a big impact! So within the scope of a fun EcoArte workshop we wanted to give children an insight into the complex world of water, pollution and waste as resource in Nicaragua. By making use of recycling, easily and in no time, trash turned into treasure! Many Thanks to Liesbeth and Victor for the wonderful collaboration!! Here is a Recap of the day in pictures!
Amigos de la Naturaleza: Sunny baking workshops and recycling furniture
Our environmental education center “Amigos de la Naturaleza” in Granada is a place to experience, explore, educate and exchange. Regularly we invite young people, to be practically educated and to find out what you can „upcycle“. Many amazing products, like this table made of old wooden pallets and tasty Nicaraguan rum bottles, were already made and you can be marveled upon in our product-album. With these products we want to encourage productivity and creativity, and also finance the center from within.
Since the rain season is ending and the sun really starts to burn again, we started to use the hot sun to our advantage: we started to bake! We invited several women to come in and exchange recipes and to meet once a week, to learn baking together. Doña Janet is helping us a lot, who has a lot of experience as a instructor. Only the oven is a new arena for her . The solar ovens and kitchens are being build and promoted by the Nicaraguan organization FUPROSOMUNIC (Fundación Proyecto Solar para Mujeres Nicaragüenses;https://www.fuprosomunic.org/) with the help of women. The women received for their innovative, healthy and sustainable work with the solar ovens the Global Energy Award 2013. We are looking forward to continuing the cooperation with them, and receiving their delicious baked goods of course. Now we can really start baking christmas cookies! You can find more pictureshere. If you are interested to support the women and the building of the bakery, then take a look at betterplace.org and there is more information in the newsletter below.
Your support is asked for:
Sustainable Engagement is fun and connects!
We are so happy, that your Engagement does not end with you volunteering, but the idea of a sustainable service with the start of your own projects or is, like our network, is continuing to grow.
In the following we want to present a couple of our volunteers, to show the diversity of their continued work:
Ludwig was with Proyecto Mosaico for 8 months in Guatemala and started, with the help of his former school, the Leibniz-Gymnasium in Berlin, a scholarship-sponsorship-project. Besides the financial support of 20 students is the peronal, intercultural contact between the students of the highest importance, which is kept up via letters and skype. To put down the foundation for this project, Ludwig traveled with one of the Berlin teachers to Guatemala. In the future this exchange is supposed to go in the other direction as well, with two Guatemalan children coming to Berlin.
Elena was a volunteer in Nicaragua, and back in Germany she threw a big fundraiser at her house. She offered delicious Nicaraguan cocktails and snacks, and made over 300€ in donations. She donated the money to two of our partner projects here in Granada and she also financed some of the school passages. When she came to visit again, she brought a big bag of collected clothes. Elenas motivation does not slow down, for December she has the next project planned: she is going to sell wristbands and Christmas cards made at her project on a Christmas market.
Miriam was a volunteer in Guatemala and has countless ideas, she wants to make reality with the help of you guys. How many people do you know, that have used clothes or other things in their basement, that they want to get rid off, but without their own effort? Miriam wants to use this. She wants to collect those things with former and future volunteers and start regular selling projects and second hand markets. She started last month; and the children are going to be very happy about more school packages coming in.
We are really grateful for the work these three did, and of course also the other, unnamed volunteers!
If you want to continue your involvement, send us a mail at netzwerk@promosaico.org or visit one of our network meetings.
Spread the word: Job postings for Universities
We have put together a catalogue of projects that are suitable for internships in different fields of study. This is the way in which we want to support our partner organizations that specialize in environmental work, education, social work und women targeted with volunteers and interns to support learning on both sides.
If you have a distributor for volunteer- or intern positions in your faculty, write an E-Mail at info@promosaico.org. We gladly send you the descriptions of our projects.
Fundraiser during Christmas time:
For our fundraiser we use the legitimate donations platform betterplace.org.
2015: School Packages for 140 children in Granada
For 2015, the financial support of the school package program is discontinued – and consequently, the school attendance of 140 children is endangered!!
Therefore we want to give a big heartfelt THANK YOU to all the dear donors of school packages! You make education possible! Owing to your kind donations already 30 children have been enabled to attend school in 2015! We are so happy, and the children even more!
Of course, we also want to offer this chance to the additional 110 children – but to make this possible we need your support Link.!! One school package for a whole school year only costs30€ but contains everything they need: The first one, handed out at the start of the school year (Video 2013), contains the obligatory school uniform, shoes and a backpack as well as school materials such as notebooks, pens and rubbers. The additional package is handed out at the Midterms (Video 2013) in July, and stocks up on needed supplies.
Share this good cause with all you friends and family so all together we can make sure that children in Santa Emilia are given a chance of education!! We already want to Thank You! in advance for all your great commitment!! You can DONATE by following this Link. Thank you so much! us to arrange a Joyful Christmas Party for the EcoArte Kids!
It is starting to become tranquil and festive and even here in Nicaragua the Christmas trees are put up and decorated! Just as in the foregone years, we want to use the festive season and organize a great Christmas Party to celebrate together with all the (school package) children and their families and friends – and you are all invited to join us on December, 21st at our centre ‚Amigos de la Naturaleza’. In accordance with the typical Nicaraguan tradition we want to hang up bulging Piñatas as well as provide each child with a little bag of happiness with a small Christmas gift. THANKS to your lovely donations we are able to make this day additionally special – the Circus School of Granada will excite the audience with an artistic presentation!! In order to enable the kids and their families this joyful Christmas Party we are happy about every support you can give to us! YOU already made 2 piñatas and 50 gift bags possible, that’s awesome! Yet, we are still trying to find a way to also finance the Christmas surprise bags to the 150 additionally expected kids. Maybe you can help?? We will keep you all up to date and of course publish pictures of our colourful celebration! Thank you very much for your kind support and we wish you a pleasant pre-Christmas season!ry AdelaNte: Help us to build a Bakery for women
What is more important than independence and autonomy? For this reason we joined with APIMUNIC to support women in Granada, in their own personal way, of achieving economic independence by creating the Bakery AdelaNte! “AdelaNte“ is composed of the initial letters of the environmental education centre “Amigos de la Naturaleza“ and means “Come in!“ but can also mean “Go forth!“. Our goal is to build a bakery from scratch, which facilitates a) the acquirement of new skills, b) the exchange of views, recipes and experiences with other women and c) the creation of revenue, benefiting both the women as well as the continued growth of the bakery and thus making Amigos de la Naturaleza a centre for training and development. Donate now! And Help Us to realise the bakery very soon so we can actively offer women an alternative to scarce future perspectives! Until now already 4% of the total budget needed has been financed, that is great!!
Muchas gracias y saludos desde Alemania y Nicaragua!
Your Proyecto Mosaico Team
Proyecto Mosaico is a German non-profit association based in Mannheim/Germany with an office in Granada/Nicaragua. The focus of our work is coordinating international volunteers to organizations and projects in various countries in Central America. In addition to the coordination of volunteers, we are actively engaged in our own projects in the fields of environmental education and water and we increasingly conduct networking activities and capacity building for our local partner organizations.
Skype: proyecto.mosaico
Facebook: Proyecto Mosaico e.V.
Homepage: www.promosaico.org
Betterplace: http://www.betterplace.org/de/organisations/promosaico
The post Proyecto Mosaico December Newsletter appeared first on Nicaragua Community.