Team El Salvador

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.

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.

We are excited to be interviewing this year’s Team Monterey 5 applicants! We are currently conducting personal interviews with potential team members and will soon face the hard task of deciding who we can take along as part of the team this January. We hope to announce the new team members by November 8th. In the meantime, we are enjoying the chance to meet and get to know a little about the amazing group of students who have applied!

Team Monterey is now looking for recruits who want to join us in El Salvador this January to continue the community development projects of the previous years and start new endeavors with our partners at La Coordinadora and Asociación Mangle. We will be holding two information sessions during the last week of September. The first will be on Tuesday, the 28th from 12:00 to 1:00 in MG100. The second will be on Wednesday, the 29th from 6:00 to 7:00 in the evening, also in MG100. We will give a small presentation about last year’s projects and talk about the projects we will be considering pursuing this year.

In preparation for our trip in January, Professor Adele Negro went down to El Salvador in August to discuss the needs of the communities of the Bajo Lempa region and the potential projects that could be made possible through our new partnerships this year. On her trip, Adele was accompanied by Nathan Weller, the Program and Policy Director of EcoViva, as well as Brett, our new partner from ALBA. The first project they discussed would be a continuation of last year’s Production Team’s work with the local market and would entail doing a community needs assessment and working to increase the presence and productivity of the local market. The second project being considered would carry on from the work of last year’s Infrastructure Team and would involve either issues of garbage collection, disposal and recycling or would again deal with the potable water distribution system. Another possible project would analyze ways for the shrimp industry to be more productive, and a final potential project would examine the possible benefits and opportunities for ecotourism. These are only some of the projects that were discussed and that are currently on the table under consideration for January.

We now begin the process of forming a new team, determining which projects we will pursue and preparing for our trip in January. We are eager to meet those of you who are interested in becoming part of Team Monterey and look forward to meeting you at our information sessions. We highly encourage anyone who is remotely interested to apply or to email us if with any questions at EquipoMonterey2011@gmail.com.