Alejandra Cardenas Gomez and Javier Aguirre Siles

Sister Cities Sharing Community

The Integral Program Educating with Love and Tenderness is a grassroots organization working with families, children and municipal agencies to increase the health, education, and peace in the family and larger community. PIEAT accomplishes this through home visits, opening child care centers and using the centers as a community base for workshops and meetings around health, child development, environmental issues and parenting or relationship building skills. In addition, they have organized an alliance with 18 other groups working with children in the Jalapa Valley to work together to share scarce resources, to have dialogue about the concerns and problems and to plan and take action together.

The presentation will show how PIEAT was formed to promote the connection of democracy, peace, basic health skills, and early childhood care and education. Using the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, PIEAT will explain how 9 local women and one man organized a group to intervene in the cycle of poverty while increasing peace in the family and community. The community has been overwhelming supportive and the effect on families and children noticeable.

 
Biography: The director Alejandra Cardenez Gomez, at 46 years of age, is presently finishing her undergraduate degree in psychology. She is the director of PIEAT. IN the past two years PIEAT has branched out and also includes literacy programs, maternal depression, programs to help women and children in domestic violent relationships, occupational therapy, and pre and post natal care. PIEAT‚‚s members are „site coordinators‰. They work in a systems approach rather than specific areas such as potable water, education, or health. They believe everything is interconnected and use the very young child as a focus for the connection. This way families and communities are included in all they do. Currently, they have presented at Association of Childhood Education International in New Orleans last April and have been asked to consult on the Global Guidelines for early childhood care and education developed in 2001 by ACEI and the United Nations. We are developing a „Peace Track‰ for the guidelines. In addition, we have been invited back to give a plenary for next year‚s conference.

Javier Aguirre started out as a translator and was so taken by the people in his community and their plight, has now joined PIEAT as a site coordinator for males and youth in the communities.

Jalapa, Nicaragua is also a sister city of Boulder, Colorado. The town has about 18,000 and the entire Valley has about 60,000 people. PIEAT currently works in the town of Jalapa and eight outlying communities.