We Won a National Award!

I think I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs that I was working on a paper based on the project I worked on for the 22 solar cookers we built for the mayor of Esteli. The paper I wrote was for a national competition in the use of renewable energy and energy savings projects sponsored by Eurocentro, a division of the European Union. The challenge for me was that the paper was totally in Spanish and I had very limited help from the Nicas because it was such a busy time. Anyway, we got a phone call last Monday and we were invited to take 10 members from our organization on an expenses paid trip to the award ceremony in Managua. I was also told that only the winners get invited.

It was a really exciting opportunity for the women because they are all pretty poor and don’t get the opportunity to hop on a bus to Managua for a trip or get all dressed up for a high class formal event like this. The award ceremony was really nice. They held it in the auditorium of the Central Bank of Nicaragua. There were ambassadors, tons of organization leaders, news cameras, and journalists attending. They started with the honorable mentions and gave a presentation on each winning project along with a short slide show of a few pictures from their work. We won second prize, which sent us home with a big trophy and a check for C$8,000! (about US$430) First place was another solar cooker project that had been in the works since 1993, so I didn’t feel bad about being second place to them since it was more of a lifetime achievement award and our project had only been over the past few months.

All the women were really excited and winning the award was a great motivator. I have to say that I am really proud of myself too. I worked on the winning project for a month, wrote the paper with some help on grammar, and took all the pictures used in the slide show. Even though I am a dumb gringo with broken Spanish, I think I made a worth while contribution to the community.