VISIONS’ primary service partner and community host is Asociación de Voluntarios para el Desarrollo Comunitario or AVODEC.  AVODEC is a grassroots community development nonprofit that addresses a range of social, environmental and economic needs. During your stay you likely will come to see how inter-connected these issues are in Jinotega and the outerlying rural communities. You will experience first-hand the vital work that AVODEC accomplishes with hands-on, ambitious and intelligent measures. Moreover, AVODEC is a group of wonderful people who relish spending time us, often stopping by our home base just to visit awhile or for dinner.

In past seasons VISIONS participants have worked constructing potable water systems--mapping canal routes, digging trenches, moving rocks, laying pipes, connecting spickets. This season AVODEC has asked us to help construct a large building in Jinotega that will double as a community and education center and, several times a year, a medical clinic for visiting U.S. physicians who come to Jinotega to perform vital surgeries.

You also will work with local kids, most likely helping teach classes at a center for disabled youth where we volunteered last summer. All the kids and staff there look forward to our return. While VISIONS provides ample supplies for our summer projects at the school, please feel free to bring some school or art supplies if you like either to donate to the center or incorporate into our lessons.

There may well be one or two other, smaller projects, depending on the community’s needs and the number of volunteers we can accommodate each day at the construction site.

Your service work in Nicaragua, which always fully engages us with local people, will be both challenging and immensely rewarding.