Tololamos
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Mission Statement
Tololamos is a humanist organization dedicated to sustainably improving the lives of rural Nicaraguans in El Tololar, León. We try to offer unique opportunities to talented students and entrepreneurs through computer grants, scholarships, and loans for small business. We also work to better the environment in and around Tololar through large reforestation projects and drip irrigation systems.
About This Cause
Tololamos is a small and cheerful nonprofit founded by Tyler Sinclair, a former Peace Corps volunteer in the Tololar region of León, Nicaragua. Our core mission is to provide opportunities to talented people that wouldn't be there otherwise. This small corner of rural Nicaragua is filled with just as many smart and motivated people as any other place, but there are comparatively few paths to escape from the country's overwhelming poverty. We try to find these people and help them get what they need to thrive. We have four broad project areas – computer grants, scholarships, drip irrigation systems and reforestation. Computer Grants – We refurbish donated laptop computers and send them down to Nicaragua, where we give them out as prizes for academic achievement in the schools. The effect of the program has been tangible and dramatic – at our first school, before we started the computer program, only 19% of students were passing all of their classes. After the first semester of our computer program, that number jumped to 43%. It has risen every semester since, and currently sits around 60%. We now work in two schools and also offer computers to entrepreneurs and college students who can put them to good use. Scholarships - We enroll hand-selected students in our Mesada program, which essentially gives them a small but meaningful monthly allowance and follows their paths through bi-monthly video interviews. Through these interviews, we try to get the students thinking critically about their life goals and forming realistic plans to achieve them. Drip Irrigation Systems - Most of Tololar’s economy is agricultural, and Tololar’s farmers are facing a daunting future. Climate change is changing the weather dramatically. Tololar is becoming hotter & drier, and rain-dependent crops are failing with greater frequency. Predatory pricing is ravaging an already-poor country. Crop buyers capitalize on farmers’ short harvest windows and buy crops at below break-even prices. Soil degradation, caused largely by relentless peanut cropping, is increasing farmers’ dependence on chemicals and further stretching their limited resources. Drip irrigation systems address all of these problems pretty well. They are hyper-efficient irrigation networks that deliver water directly to plants’ roots, without much loss to evaporation. The water comes from the farmer’s own well, and gives him the ability to plant and harvest at any time of the year, avoiding the predatory pricing that comes at normal harvest time. Drip-irrigated crops can also be planted healthily at high densities, reducing land usage and freeing some land to be reforested. Cost is the prohibitive factor for most farmers – a full system costs about $2400, which is twice the average annual salary in Tololar. Tololamos makes these systems affordable by offering them as a subsidized loan – interested farmers can apply to receive a system at half cost, which they can repay over a period of 5 years, interest-free. Reforestation - Tololar is severely denuded and dominated by vast peanut fields, which are run by large agricultural firms. They pose many problems to the community: ECONOMIC- Most of the peanut fields are rented by agro-businesses on long-term contracts, which pay Tololar landowners a far-undervalued rate (about $50 per acre annually). ECOLOGICAL – Peanuts are harvested right after the last rains and the huge fields are left barren for the following six months. The wind creates powerful dust storms that degrade the soil and pervade people’s houses and lungs. HEALTH – Peanut growers routinely spray code-red chemicals on their crops, without regard for nearby households or worker exposure. Many of these chemicals are illegal even in Nicaragua, and there are no laws stipulating a minimum spray distance from houses. There is no disguising the damages of this practice – children die every year in Tololar from kidney failure and respiratory infections that are likely linked to pesticides. Reforestation helps the situation by creating windbreaks between fields, which calm the dust storms and act as a barrier for pesticides. Combined with drip irrigation systems, trees also help stabilize the soil and make Tololar a more pleasant, healthier and shadier place to live. Reforestation is also very cheap to do. Tololamos funds a tree nursery run by Tololareño Denis Moran, which annually plants and gives away 10,000 native tree species (including Tololar’s namesake tree, the Tololo). Materials and labor for the nursery cost approximately $300, or $.03 per tree.