All families for the community in Nicaragua that Community United Methodist Church is building are from one of two current areas in Nicaragua: Casas Blancas and Santa Carmelo. A description of both areas are found below. Please pray for this new community as it is built over the course of the next four to six months. Also, please pray for the new families as they prepare for their new homes! 

Casas Blancas

Casas Blancas (White Houses) community is located 1 km from La Dalia district. It is a fertile area surrounded by many trees, and its main economic activity is agriculture, sowing grains such as corn and beans. They live in extreme poverty conditions. It is a big community where its inhabitants work the land and also as maids. During the coffee harvest season they travel to other farms to work there and earn money for the sustainability of their families. Sometimes they find themselves forced to go away from their community since there is no other way to survive. In this community there are three scholars who work in the Rainbow School, in which there are about 30 children who attend it daily to receive school reinforcement. There is an elementary school in which most of the children study. High school students travel to La Dalia in order to study there since there’s no high school in the community. Housing conditions here are bad, so people find themselves forced to live with their relatives stacked in the same house.

Santa Carmela

Santa Carmela community is located 6 km from the district of La Dalia. It is a fertile area surrounded by many trees, and its main economic activity is the agriculture; they sow grains such as beans, corn and rice. They live in extreme poverty conditions and in a landslides vulnerable area because of its geographic situation. There is a river through which it is impossible to pass during winter because of its volume of water. This makes house access and children getting to school difficult. The economically active population work the land - residents sow corn, beans and rice for the family consumption - but best time for work is during the coffee harvest in different coffee farms. This means, though, going away from home to far different farms during this season. They do this in order to get a better income so that they can support their families. They have electrical power but don’t have potable water. There is an elementary school that receives children from first to sixth year; it has two teachers and each one of them teaches three different levels out of the six that the school offers. It also has a preschool teacher, who is a Rainbow Network scholarship student named Elieta Maria Rugama. The infrastructure of the houses doesn’t fulfill the minimal required conditions to be inhabited because of the poverty rate in which families live.