The Team Monterey El Salvador leadership is proud to announce the selection of Sarah Schwid, Heather Bessette, Chase Anthony Coniglio and Lyndsie Ullrich as the new leaders for the 2012 team!!  This new leadership team met last week, in the midst of finals and summer travel plans, to discuss the path forward and next year’s projects.  Planning for the projects will begin this summer through communication with our partner organization in El Salvador to lay the groundwork for next January.  Project planning will continue throughout the year as our new team leaders work to prepare another amazing J-term experience that provides MIIS students with an opportunity to use their skills to realize community development in rural El Salvador, all while earning credits.  For more information about our past projects and experiences, please see our Projects page and check out our video blogs.  Follow us here to learn more about what Team Monterey El Salvador 6 will be doing in 2012.

Equipo Monterey (Team Monterey) El Salvador is looking for new student team leaders to help organize the practicum throughout the year and lead projects on the ground in January 2012. We are now accepting applications online until midnight on May 6th. Team leaders gain invaluable experience helping to organize the practicum and lead project teams on the ground in El Salvador. This position provides an opportunity to practice leadership skills, organize an academic program and gain first hand experience working with a civil society organization to carry out community development projects.  It also offers students a chance to utilize the skills they are learning in class while immersed in the Spanish language. The variety of experiences provided by this position may add whole new categories to your resume, but it will definitely enhance your academic experience. Student leaders must have 300-400 level Spanish proficiency and be willing to act as leaders as soon as they are accepted to the position. Leadership tasks include marketing and planning the program, recruiting and selecting the team, organizing pre-departure meetings and planning logistics.  However, the most important role of the team leaders is to lead the projects on the ground in El Salvador, and work with their teams upon return to write the project reports. If you are interested in applying for this amazing experience, please complete the online application and email your resume to equipomonterey2011@gmail.com  prior to midnight on May 6th. (Early applications encouraged!!) Applicants will be contacted to arrange interviews once all of their materials have been received and reviewed.

To access the online application, click here.

Our dedicated team has been working hard throughout the semester to complete our final project reports for our partner organization in El Salvador.  Now that our work has finally come to an end, we would like to share our experiences and stories with the MIIS community and beyond.  We will be giving a presentation on our work on March 16th at 6pm in MG102.  Come learn about Team Monterey El Salvador, the projects we carried out this January, and how you can get involved.  We will soon be recruiting new student team leaders to organize the practicum, oversee the application process, and lead development projects in the field next January.  Once we have new leaders we will start the process of recruiting students for Team Monterey 6.  If you are interested in participating, or would just like to learn more about what we do, please stop by for our presentation on Wednesday, March 16th at 6:00pm in McGowan 102.

We arrived back in Monterey on January 22nd tired, hungry, dirty and content. The final week in El Salvador was busy as our teams worked to finish up the projects and present our findings and recommendations to the Board of Directors. Each project team finished up our work on the ground with a presentation to the organization about what we did during the three weeks and what sort of follow-up work we recommend to continue the projects that were started. At this presentation we also gave each Program Director at Asociación Mangle a brief preliminary report that summarizes our objectives, methodology, findings and recommendations. This preliminary report will be supplemented with a comprehensive full-length final report which each team is currently in the process of writing.

The reports we write upon our return from El Salvador are translated to Spanish and sent back to Asociación Mangle for their use. The organization uses these reports to seek further funding for their projects so that they may continue to expand their programs and bring services to more people. This year we had the pleasure of meeting two new employees on the potable water project whose employment was made by possible due to funding Asociación Mangle received as a result of the project report completed by Team Monterey 4′s Infrastructure Team. It was exciting to learn about how our project work has impacted the organization and to see exactly how our reports are put to use.

The project teams will be working hard in the coming weeks to complete this year’s reports on the work we carried out during those three very busy weeks in El Salvador. We will be preparing a presentation to share more about our work and experiences with students who are curious about our Team Monterey El Salvador and interested in J-Term opportunities. If you would like to learn more, please feel free to email us at:  equipomonterey2011@gmail.com.

We have reached a midpoint in our work here on the ground in El Salvador. The days have grown hotter and seemingly longer over the week and a half since we arrived. Our three project teams have spent the days solidifying the project goals and objectives with our partners within the organization and carrying out our work in the field.

The environmental team is working with five communities in the Bajo Lempa region with the goal of developing a community ecotourism plan.  The goal is to have a network of communities that will create a route for community ecotourism in the area.  In order to achieve this goal, we are meeting with the board of directors in each of the five communities:  Aguacate, San Jose, Isla de Mendez, Ceiba, and Llanos.  The goal of these meetings is to draw a map of the current ecotourism situation in the town, and follow with a futuristic map of where they would like to see their community in the future within the realm of ecotourism. These maps will be discussed by all community members using strategic questions that will contribute to a SWOT Analysis for each community.  After the environmental team meets individually with each community, we will then meet with all five communities together to visualize the maps together in order to see the possible tourist route, as well as devise a two-year strategic plan.

The Infrastructure team is working to develop a waste management model that can be customized to rural and protected environment areas that have limited resources.  We are using the Isla de Mendes region of El Salvador as our case study, where a yearlong waste management program had been implemented but failed due to a lack of sustainability and resources. The purpose of this model will be to establish specific guidelines in designing a Waste Management Plan that can be tested through a pilot program, and then adapted and customized to meet the needs of the various surrounding communities.

The production team is working to refine a diagnostic tool which La Coordinadora will use in order to create a database of information about the agricultural production practices and potential of the various communities of the Bajo Lempa. This tool will help La Coordinadora understand the current agricultural production capacity, level of diversification and knowledge about sustainable methods in the area. Additionally, we will be identifying certain indicators that will be used to assess the sustainability of the practices currently used in the area. We will use the diagnostic tool to survey a small sample of the community of Limonera, and use the data to create a workshop in order to train the Agricultural Production Program workers on how to use the tool and analyze the data they will obtain. The goal is to create a reliable, replicable tool that can be used to assess and compare all the communities of the Bajo Lempa so that La Coordinadora will be better able to serve them and gauge the potential for the creation of local markets.