Team El Salvador

The fifth year of Team Monterey El Salvador arrived on the ground in Ciudad Romero early Monday morning on January 3rd. This year’s team is comprised of an excellent group of students from each of the program fields including, Antonio Armendariz (our translator from the T&I school), Mike Atoria, Brandon Humphrey, Susy Valle, Sarah Schwid, Megan Christenson, Steve Wuerth, Scott Depies, Brooke Greco, Heather Bessette, and the three student team leaders, Emily Hanks, Karin Orr and Melissa Summers. Tuesday we met with the Junta Directiva (Board of Directors) of La Coordinadora to discuss our projects and the work we will be doing for the next three weeks. We then set out in our project teams on Wednesday to begin our work and familiarize ourselves with the communities. Our projects this year include: an environmental project that will be working to create a business plan for an ecotourism model in the area; an infrastructure project that will develop a replicable waste management model for communities of the Bajo Lempa; and a production project that will help La Coordinadora devise tools in order to assess food production and distribution, and also to create a plan for expanding community gardens with the goal of increasing and diversifying agricultural production in the communities of the Bajo Lempa. We are excited to see how these projects will progress.