The Condega Homemakers Project: Sending Women's Building Brigades to Nicaragua

NYC Women's Building Brigades to Rebuild
Nicaraguan Houses Destroyed by Hurricane Mitch

For Immediate Release

Friday, February 12, 1999

Contact:

Margarita Suarez, Coordinator, Condega Homemakers Project
212-854-5434

New York City -- On February 19, 1999, five women from the New York area will travel to Condega, Nicaragua, to help rebuild houses destroyed by Hurricane Mitch. This group will be the first building brigade sent by the Condega Homemakers Project, a small, grass-roots, New York-based organization of women. They will assist the Women's Construction Collective in Condega, which for ten years has trained Nicaraguan women in non-traditional skills such as carpentry, iron work, and building construction. With the help of international building brigades, the Collective plans to rebuild 30 houses this summer. The Condega Homemakers Project will assist with future brigades planned for May and August. In addition to assembling the brigades, the Project is trying to raise money for tools and building materials.

The severe flooding brought by Hurricane Mitch in October and November 1998 destroyed 550 houses and left 10,000 people homeless in Condega, a poor, rural town near the Honduran border. The Condega Homemakers Project brigades will help build houses for women, many of them single mothers, who have been left homeless by the floods. The Collective has identified those women who have been overlooked by other relief efforts. Besides attending to the immediate housing needs of the women of Condega, the Condega Homemakers Project will have lasting effects: women will learn valuable skills, and women will become homeowners, a status uncommon for women in Nicaragua.

Explaining her motivations for organizing the brigades, Margarita Suarez, the Project's founder, states: "In October 1997 I spent a week in Condega while traveling in Central America. During that time I worked at the Women's Construction Collective on a building project. So when I heard about the hurricane last year and the devastation it caused in Condega, it really shook up my priorities. A friend of mine happened to be traveling in Condega when the hurricane hit, and she was stranded without telephone, electricity, transportation, or clean drinking water for twelve days. She contracted malaria, but luckily her American citizenship bought her a U.S. Marine airlift to Managua. While I was relieved that my friend was able to get prompt medical treatment, the image of the people of Condega watching that U.S. Marine helicopter take off really struck me. Suddenly, all the annoying things about life in New York City seemed mundane. It's amazing to think that next week I would have been snowboarding in Switzerland instead of building houses in Nicaragua."

The Condega Homemakers project is currently accepting donations. MADRE, an international women's human rights organization, is the project's fiscal sponsor. To make a tax-deductible contribution, please make checks out to MADRE and write "Condega Homemakers Project" in the memo. Send donations to Condega Homemakers Project, Columbia University Station, P.O. Box 250516, New York, NY 10025.

To join a brigade or to help in the fund-raising effort, call 212-854-5434 or email homemakers@homemakers.org. More information is available on the Project's web page: http://www.columbia.edu/~marg/homemakers/