Edu-tourism Nicaragua
By Paul Martin

Nicaragua Spanish Schools offers an edu-tourism
experience for foreign visitors and an alternative model
of native-centered development for Nicaragua based on
classical concepts of natural economic law. NSS believes
that true Nicaraguan prosperity can only be achieved
through balanced development of local industries
including but not limited to eco-tourism. Our program
educates our students about the reality of Nicaraguan
socio-economics allowing them to understand the real
cause and effect of the various economic activities in
Nicaragua.

NSS began by spearheading a movement for
ecologically sustainable non-destructive development in
Nicaragua based on the idea of "eco-tourism." As modeled
by programs like NSS, eco-tourism is the visitation of
Nicaragua by "eco-tourists" with the intent to explore and
experience her natural ecology and traditional cultures
without also causing a negative impact that disrupts and
harms the land and culture of the native people.

The ideal of eco-tourism is where the tourists and service
providers consciously strive to minimize disruptive effects
on the local environment and community by, for instance,
not demanding or providing motorized transportation where
for centuries only footpaths have existed, or not demanding
or permitting the erection of a Macdonald's fast food restaurant
where the local cuisine has always been served from small
family-owned restaurants, or not demanding or permitting the
erection of an eyesore high rise hotel on a beach-side location
where small scale family-owned hotels already exist, or not
excluding the native people from participation in the tourist
economy unless they learn to speak English and dress like
Europeans. The idea is to bring a moderate amount of people
from "developed" countries to Nicaragua to enjoy the native
goodness of the country and people without changing the basic
culture or ecology to do it. However, as is being discovered in
various countries, eco-tourism's utopian image does not live
up to its inevitable consequences in an unregulated free market.

Once the number of tourists reaches a certain level, the
environmental and cultural impact becomes negative very
quickly, thus negating the whole concept of eco-tourism. The
reality is that any new industry seems good until it grows beyond
its healthy stage of application. Therefore, NSS offers an "edu-
tourism" program to educate our students about the real
underlying issues which determine the best choices for economic
development in countries like Nicaragua. Within that process,
we offer an "edu-tourism" experience for foreign students while
modeling organizational development that can be applied to local
productive activities such as agriculture and industry.

The ideal would be to encourage an popular native-centered
development process with public investment directed toward
supporting locally-owned productive activities. Unfortunately,
within the private property of land system, the natural incentives
are toward resource monopoly and macro-economic policies
that strongly favor the land-owning class at the expense of
productive capital investment and labor.

The real change that is needed can only be accomplished within
an economic system which ensures the equitable distribution of
socially created land rents (monopoly profits) and the guarantee
of full tax-free income for private labor and capital investment.
Such solutions seem impractical in the mono-thought developed
world but become practical reality for NSS students who see
revealed first hand the cause and effects of poverty in Nicaragua
and the credible possibility of their remedy.

Apart from the economic education of the NSS program, the fun
of edu-tourism in Nicaragua is leaving your own cultural structures
behind and being accepted as part of the land and people you are
visiting, getting back to nature and the natural part of yourself that
is conserved in traditional Nicaraguan culture. European and U.S.
citizens are attracted to eco-tourism in Nicaragua because it allows
them to experience nature and themselves with a minimum of
governmental interference and social taboos. Nicaraguans are
unique in their relaxed, interested and accepting approach to the
human condition. From politics to sexual relations, everything is
subject to conversation, comment and humor.

A basic part of eco-tourism is learning to communicate in the
language of the host country. Nicaragua Spanish Schools provides
Spanish language classes and excursions for students to visit the
many interesting and wonderful sites in Nicaragua. By striving to
learn the native Spanish language and understand the culture, NSS
students are more visitors than tourists. They come to be with the
people, talk with them, share their experience, rather than just
passing through viewing the natives as part of the landscape.
Nicaraguans appreciate this and it adds to the feeling of respect,
warmth and fraternity felt between visitors and hosts.

Part of NSS' model of development is fair distribution of eco-tourism
income and reinvestment in local communities. The money that
NSS schools earn goes directly to teachers and host families and
locally owned service providers and creates a fund for common
benefit of all involved. Each school in turn helps support social,
ecological or cultural development programs in its community.

NSS strives to diversify its services and service providers to
distribute income benefits as widely as possible throughout
each community where NSS schools are located. In this way,
one dollar imported into Nicaragua has a multiply effect in the
popular economy.

Many people look around at our own country and bemoan the
problems that false prosperity has brought us. We are choking
on our materialism and suffering all kinds of environmental, social
and psycho-emotional ills, and this we want to share with the rest
of the world. NSS wants to model a different kind of development in

Nicaragua that conserves traditional relationships between
people and their land and neighbors as the primary relationship that
defines the culture. That, in great measure, is what the developed
world has lost, but what countries like Nicaragua still have. For
that reason, Nicaragua is a valuable reference for our fading
memory of what life used to be before the beginning of the age of
mass marketing and alienating consumerism. NSS hopes that
through the educational aspect of our program, the experience of
our students in the Nicaraguan community will open the door to
positive inquiry and the possibility of intelligent action to deal with
the real causes of poverty which progress and development in
and of themselves cannot cure.

Paul Martin is the Director of Nicaragua Spanish Schools.
He can be reached via email: nss-pmc@prodigy.net