Tara O'Shea in Nicaragua

Tara O'Shea interned with La Asociación para el Desarrollo de Chagüitillo in Chagüitillo, Nicaragua. While Chagüitillo has an incredibly abundant and beautiful environment and is home to a small farming community, the community faces the difficulty of balancing its need for resources with environmental preservation.

As a result of the need for cooking fuel, the surrounding hills are being deforested at an alarming rate. Working with host organization partners, Tara helped to implement an ecological stoves project.

They designed a ceramic, coffee bean shell burning stove. Through a series of workshops, eight women learned the skill of ceramics and are now producing the ecological stoves.

The Pre-Colombian Museum of Chagüitillo is continuing the project through the sale of stoves, providing funds to finance this and other on-going community projects. The project teaches a productive skill, promotes environmental awareness and offers an alternative cooking fuel to better environmental and economic standards.Tara also worked with the museum and received $31,000 of funding to establish an archaeological park in Chagüitillo. The project preserves a vast majority of the forest and waterways of Chagüitillo's surrounding hills.