Like a lot of people, 37-year-old Rob Buscaglia doesn’t believe in coincidence. In 1993, the Delaware County native joined the Peace Corps after living for a short time on a Native-American reservation in Washington state.
Following three months of Peace Corps training in Honduras — including Spanish language classes — Buscaglia received his assignment: Nicaragua.
Apprehensive at first because of its war-torn climate (the brutal 10-year war between the socialist Sandinistas and the counterrevolutionary Contras ended with a peace treaty in 1989), he decided to read up on the country and its people.
On the back of a book he had purchased was a photograph of a man and woman. Their faces looked mighty familiar, but Buscaglia, who now lives in Queen Village, couldn’t place them. That is, until Mass the following Sunday at his parish in Washington.
During the exchange of peace, a couple in front of him turned and extended hands — they were the same couple from the book and fellow parishioners at that.
If God himself had appeared that day before Buscaglia, instructing him to pack his bags for Nicaragua, it couldn’t have been a more obvious sign, he believes.
After quizzing the couple about the Central American country nestled between Honduras and Costa Rica, all Buscaglia’s doubts dissipated.
"OK, the fates have converged. That was just amazing," he says of the experience. "I’ve always been convinced that there are no coincidences — and that was confirmed. I never turned back from that point. I knew that was what I was supposed to do."
From 1993-95, Buscaglia worked as a small-business development Peace Corps volunteer in the poor rural community of Monte Rosa. Located on the northwest Pacific coast of Nicaragua, the land where Monte Rosa now exists was originally nothing more than sugar-cane fields and farmland.
During his time in Nicaragua, Buscaglia worked with what are known as micro-entrepreneurs — a fancy-sounding term for vendors who sell wares and goods. Micro enterprise makes up 50 percent of the Nicaraguan work force. Buscaglia’s biggest achievement was starting a bakery that is still in existence today. The volunteer motivated and trained mostly women (sorely lacking in the Nicaraguan work force) to run the small, rustic store, called Buscaglia Bakery.
After his Peace Corps stint, Buscaglia moved to Philadelphia, where he lived in the Fairmount section and enrolled in the master’s program at La Salle University. One day, a Spanish teacher at La Salle asked him to speak to her students about his Nicaraguan experience.
And that’s when it dawned on Buscaglia that the best way to show the students what he was talking about would be to bring them to Nicaragua.
"If they see the people and the beauty of the place, they might be compelled to help or at least understand," he says. "To build a relationship between our community and their community — to have some kind of partnership would be nice."
So the seeds for a unique service-learning organization called Ayudanica were sown at La Salle and cultivated at Holy Ghost Preparatory School in Bensalem, where Buscaglia went on to teach Spanish for four years. One of the conditions of his employment was to bring Ayudanica with him. In Spanish, the name of the group translates to "helping Nicaragua."
During his Holy Ghost tenure, Buscaglia brought 60 kids — 15 at a time — to the country.
One of the bigger projects Buscaglia and his students took on over a period of years was the refurbishment of a deteriorating community center. The team rehabbed the place from the ground up, including fixing windows and doors and applying paint, recalls the founder. Over time, the place evolved into a community learning center. Microsoft donated software in Spanish for the computer center, 700 books line the shelves of the library and sporting supplies abound.
Another coup for Buscaglia and his students was the establishment of a preschool.
Ayudanica strives for direct involvement with the population. Student volunteers work cooperatively with Nicaraguan teens from the communities to assess needs and develop and implement educational programs.
"It’s a grassroots effort," Buscaglia notes.
He credits much of Ayudanica’s success to teamwork — a group effort by Holy Ghost students, their parents and instructors. The scope and outreach of the program grew so much during those four years at the high school, Buscaglia decided to turn Ayudanica into a nonprofit organization.
As Ayudanica enters its seventh year, the popularity of the project, as well as its scope and outreach, have grown dramatically. Its founder, who had until September run the project on a volunteer basis, now oversees the program full-time from his home on the 900 block of Bodine Street. Nine weeks ago, he and wife Lisa welcomed their first child, Noah.
Organizing the Monte Rosa community through Ayudanica has paved the way for other world service organizations to set up shop there, Buscaglia says. Save the Children, Plan International and Africa 70 are just three of the groups offering help and hope to impoverished Nicaraguans.
Ever grateful for the helping hands provided by Buscaglia and his students, the people of Monte Rosa today call the founder Don Roberto — the ‘don’ an expression of respect, Buscaglia says with a laugh.
Not bad for a guy who couldn’t utter one word of Spanish before his Peace Corps training.
"I look back at it and I didn’t know any Spanish at first. Now I look 10 years ahead and I’m seeing the community grow up and as I see that, I see the impact I’ve had," he says.
"A community can be empowered by organizing itself with resources and development. As I look now, I say, ‘Wow, we’ve come a long way.’ And if we can implement this in other communities, we can have a pretty significant impact."
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Ayudanica is accepting ninth- through 12th-graders from all areas of the city. For more information, visit www.ayudanica.org.
