St. Albert extends its heart and hands to Nicaragua

‘Help us so that we can help others.’ That’s the message of a St. Albert-based non-governmental organization operating in Nicaragua.

The Roots of Change Foundation (ROCF) has been working there — the second poorest country in all of the Americas — for five years now and has its hands in more than 30 projects. According to its founder Father Denis HĂ©bert, its objective is to provide and improve the basic human rights of primary health care, employment and educational opportunities, all while helping to put more food on the table for the vast majority of the population.

HĂ©bert helped give a presentation on Monday morning to the staff and students at the St. Gabriel Storefront School. Many Nicaraguans live on less than $2 or $3 each day. When you consider that many of these unskilled and undereducated people can’t even work for several months each year due to the extensive rainy season, it’s easy to see how the cycle of poverty would seem nearly impossible to break.

He conducted the presentation with the help of two representatives from the Fundacion Accion Comunitaria (FUNDACCO), the Nicaraguan organization that acts as the ROCF’s agent. Their collective message was that of promoting awareness here in order to foster learning there. According to the presenters, if you give a Nicaraguan a fish then you will feed their family but if you teach a Nicaraguan to fish then they can feed their community.

HĂ©bert said that when he first arrived in that country 20 years ago, he asked his bishop about starting a social pastoral program to help the people come into their own, or as he said, “to empower them, so that they could bring about change in their own lives.

“The level of poverty now is extreme. Unless you have what is necessary to live, you live in poverty and there’s no way out without the initiative of the people to bring about change. We work at that level.”

He said that there has already been much progress in only five years, especially when it comes to helping the young with their educational careers. FUNDACCO administers a scholarship fund and one of their recent success stories involves a young woman who is on the verge of starting a credit union to help others.

“We must get them involved in their own development and we must respect the way they do things and the way they think things out. That is our challenge — to not impose a way that is foreign to them but to try and reach their heart, their soul, their intellect, so that they can themselves respond to that spark of life that is in them and bring about a change. It’s lifelong work.”