environment

by Jane Furchgott, President, Richland Center-Santa Teresa Sister City Project

Last December, I spent a night at the sea turtle nesting beach of Nicaragua's Chococente Wildlife Refuge. The atmosphere at the MARENA (Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources) guard station there felt lighter for the first time in the seven years I've been visiting Chococente. The guards were joking as they worked through the night on a report due the next day in Managua. The turtles were laying their eggs in peace -- no nests were being dug up, nor were there any other suspicious activities under cover of darkness.

Subtitled "the importance of emotional recovery in the face of natural disasters and gender violence," this document reports on the work from 1998 to 2001 of the Commission of Psychosocial Development of the Women’s Network against Violence. When Hurricane Mitch struck Central America in 1998, it claimed more than 2,500 lives in Nicaragua alone, adding to the trauma of a country whose history was already strewn with natural and social disasters. The Women's Network brought together women's organizations in response to the hurricane, but discovered that the problem people faced "was a lot bigger than Mitch. It had to do with poverty, abandonment, interfamily violence, the war, ... so we exchanged life experiences and knowledge in order to have an integral vision." This English-language document is a translation of a longer report that was originally published in Spanish under the title: Reconstruyendo vidas, reconstruimos Nicaragua: La importancia de la Recuperación Emocional ante fenómenos naturales y la violencia de genero, with financial support from Bread for the World (Pan Para el Mundo) and WCCN.