Making solidarity even more solid through Nicaragua-UK teacher exchanges

By Julie Lamin, an author, poet and creative writing tutor living on Merseyside. Julie has been a solidarity activist for many years and is co-chair of NSCAG. As a long-standing member of the National Education Union (NEU), Julie has led three NEU- sponsored educational exchanges taking UK teachers to Nicaragua. 

Solidarity can mean many things, but its first requirement is that you lift yourself from a place of comfort to follow your conscience, whether it’s to sign an online petition or to travel several thousand miles to another country. All acts of solidarity matter, but it’s the last one that not only matters most, but is the most rewarding.

For the last decade, the links of solidarity between the National Education Union (NEU) and its Nicaraguan sister union, ANDEN have been growing stronger. What started with a hug and a handshake in 2016 between the top-level leaders of each union, has now become an interwoven bond between dozens of classroom teachers and union members of both countries. This is thanks to the jointly organised NEU-funded Teacher Exchanges to support Nicaragua’s ambitious target of creating generations of students able to speak their mother tongue Spanish alongside English as a Second Language.

2017: Members of the Nicaraguan teachers’ union ANDEN with former NUT International Secretary Christine Blower and former International Secretary Samidha Garg.

In the last ten years since those first cordial agreements, we have become more than comrades in name, we have become friends and activists, working hard in both countries to keep strengthening the bond, and extending it to include the children and young people we teach in the UK and in Nicaragua.

2026 is the quiet anniversary of celebrating those friendships in the clinch of solidarity, that isn’t just a name. Words ‘sister and brother’ sound right, because we feel we are family as well as international comrades, and we were delighted that our esteemed comrade and friend, Sebastian Mendieta, was invited to represent ANDEN as one of the NEU’s international guests. This was the second time Sebastian has travelled from Nicaragua to the annual NEU conference, this year in Brighton, and the third time he has represented Nicaraguan teachers as an international guest of the NEU.

Sebastian Mendieta with Natasha Witham, a member of the 2024 UK teachers delegation to Nicaragua.

Sebastian comes as the chosen representative of ANDEN union leader, Jose Antonio Zepeda. He speaks with knowledge and passion, representing not only the ANDEN leadership, but ANDEN teachers and the people of Nicaragua who have been through so much suffering to arrive at where the country is now: free, lifelong education from the smallest child to the oldest adult; an ambitious education plan to enable Nicaraguans to be the best resource capable of leading their country out of the poverty and violence of the twentieth-century Somoza dictatorship and  neo-liberal government.

Sebastian is a living testimony to that struggle for progress. As a teenager, he was prepared to give his life by fighting as a Sandinista against the cruelty and corruption of the Somoza dictatorship. Following the triumphant 1979 Sandinista Revolution, Sebastian was one of the 60,000 young people who took up the best weapons against poverty – the pen and the notebook – and was part of Nicaragua’s successful Literacy Crusade – Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización, which reduced illiteracy from 50% to 12%.

1980 literacy crusade, pencils were their only weapons

Sebastian told us that he enjoyed the teaching experience of the Literacy Crusade so much, he chose to become a teacher. Alongside teaching PE he became active in ANDEN, and is now Regional Secretary of the Carazo region and a representative on ANDEN’s National Executive Committee.

At this year’s NEU Brighton Conference International Fringe Meeting, he told a full-to-capacity audience that although Nicaragua was not suffering such intense US funded violence, sanctions and blockades  as Cuba, Palestine and Lebanon, all four countries have the same shared enemy: imperialism.

Nicaraguans have a hundred and fifty-year history of the US invading and trying to run Nicaragua, but Nicaraguans have always resisted: 50,000 people died in the 1970s insurrection against the Somoza dictatorship and thousands more were killed by US-backed counter-revolutionaries (‘contras’) in the 1980s.

Immense progress is being made with the Sandinistas in government since 2007. This includes housing, the infrastructure of brand-new roads connecting regions that were once isolated, extensive access to nourishing food, and free health care and education. People know what can be achieved when Nicaraguans run the country in their own interests and not those of foreign powers.

     “Sovereignty is everything,” Sebastian told the meeting. “If we are forced to, we will defend our sovereignty with weapons in our hands and with our lives. We have done it before and we can do it again. There is no going back: Ni un paso atràs!”

 The only ‘going back’ is that of the NEU teachers who will be ‘going back’ to Nicaragua this summer. UK teachers will stay with families and visit schools. It will be an exchange in the truest sense: supporting teachers in their classrooms with effective methods of learning a second language, while receiving in abundance Nicaraguan hospitality.

We will come back to the UK wanting to share the awe-inspiring nature of Nicaraguan education, making our solidarity even more solid.