This squatter's settlement located a little over two miles from BWAB/FUNDADEJO's office El Triangulo de la Solidaridadand dormitory has between 1500-2000 squatters living on about 3 acres of land with the great majority of them being illegal immigrants from Nicaragua. This precario (a Spanish word that comes from the Latin word "precarious") has existed just north of downtown San Jose for over 7 years.

Costa Rica has between 20,000 to 40,000 people living within the 300 precarios in the country. These neighborhoods are made up of houses constructed from pieces of metal and wood, many of which have dirt floors, and are extremely unsanitary, with open sewage, diseased dogs and unclean water.

Most families within the precario make less than $200 a month and the average person there drops out of school between the 3rd and 6th grade.

What We Do

Walkthroughs
BWAB/FUNDADEJO staff members combine with volunteers to walk through the precario several times a week, making contact with the families and developing deeper and deeper relationships with them.

Meeting Urgent Needs
Here, BWAB/FUNDADEJO teams offer assistance to families in the precario in three different areas listed below. These programs allow us to deepen our contact with individuals in the community as well as allowing us to directly respond to young people and their families in trouble. The art of this work is to help the family or individual respond to the process in a way that builds relationships and equips them for the future but which does not establish a relationship of dependence.

• School Supplies
  Within the context of relationships, the BWAB/FUNDADEJO team works to help families buy the school supplies necessary for their children to continue in school.
• Medical Needs
  Families with emergency medical needs are connected to medical professionals who can help them. This includes home visits from volunteer doctors all the way to setting up a temporary dental clinic for five days that treated over one hundred people in five days.
• Occupational Help
  Whether it is about helping individuals prepare their resume to look for a job or offering English classes to provide more attractive job skills, the team works to help individuals within the precario find ways to find meaningful employment.

Focused Small Groups
This includes small groups for women, men, children, young men (lot's of soccer!) and young women (in the works). These groups are small groups that allow a foundation for offering mentoring relationships as well as platforms for providing education and equipping.

Family Groups in the Precario
These family groups are the deepest level of BWAB/FUNDADEJO community development in that they connect mentoring and small group community with families in a way that allows the family to "grow" the group through their family network.

Costa Rica's international reputation as a functional and stable democracy whose educational and health standards are outshone only by the kindness and caring nature of its people is decaying on a moment to moment basis as the state of Costa Rica's educational system erodes. In the 1980's, the government's perennial public deficit led to pressure from international lenders to decrease spending. Education took the hardest hit. As the government began to enact policies towards holding down teacher salaries and funding for school's basic needs, the level of education provided for students plummeted as did the capacity of students to achieve the country's set academic standards. As this pattern of young people receiving less educational development continues to collide with the trend of weakening families and increased adolescent involvement in high-risk behaviors and their results, Costa Rica will face a significant national decline.

What We Do

BWAB/FUNDADEJO currently works in Lincoln International School north of San Jose. Lincoln is one of the three finest schools in Costa Rica and produces many of the country's future leaders. Our team members currently coach the girl's basketball team, lead the school's vibrant Community Service Club and BWAB/FUNDADEJO leads all of the school's camps for grades seven through twelve. Lincoln School's Community Service Club is teaming with BWAB/FUNDADEJO and the Intel Corporation to begin a youth development movement called "TOPE" which is focused on founding mentoring/tutoring centers across the country. So far the group has planted two of these centers.