Local Representative

Johanna Reimer

AACC has a representative, Johanna Reimer, who will be living in Jalapa, Nicaragua for seven months starting in January, 2010. She will be coordinating the construction and development of a vocational school that will serve the street children of Jalapa.

Johanna is a 24-year old student at Naropa University majoring in Peace Studies and Visual Arts with a personal focus on education as an instrument for social transformation and justice. She is very grateful for the opportunity she has had to learn tools such as dialogue, critical pedagogy, nonviolent resistance, and different peace building initiatives around the world, but feels that it is not enough to simply bank these theories. She wants to go into the world and live them, breath them, and live them! She strongly believes that it is through education that our world will begin to transform.

Ever since her first experiences traveling in impoverished countries in Africa and Asia she has been overwhelmed by the questions of where to start because there is such great need. Despite her limited Spanish, she knows that it is in Nicaragua with the women if PIEAT organizing the building of a community supported vocational school for the street children of Jalapa that she will find her opportunity.  She is very excited to start her work, which in her words is to "provide these street children with some of the basic human right every child deserves - the right to shelter, food, protection from harm, and EDUCATION!"