Photos courtesy of Green Empowerment and the Blacksburg-Bocay Project

San Jose de Bocay, Blacksburg's sister city, is a rural village of 3,000 to 5,000 residents in the rugged mountains of northern Nicaragua on the edge of one of Central America's largest intact rainforests. For decades the villagers have struggled to recover from war and natural disasters.

Blacksburg Sister City travelers — (from left) Jim Bier, Clark Webb, Phyllis Albritton, Rhoda Myers, the late Derek Myers, Bryan Murray and an unidentified woman — visit the grave of Benjamin Lender, a U.S. engineer killed during the Nicaraguan Civil War while surveying the site of a hydroelectric dam for the village of San Jose de Bocay.

BLACKSBURG -- The transcontinental trip is over, but the work has just begun for the Blacksburg-Bocay Sister City Committee.

During a 12-day trip in January to the remote northern Nicaraguan mountains, a group of nine -- eight Blacksburg residents and a retired chemistry professor from Ferrum -- toured coffee farms, met with officials and teachers and participated in a cleanup project.

They even taught a group of villagers to do the Hokie Pokey, trip organizer Clark Webb said.

Most importantly, they heard from villagers and saw for themselves the hard-won progress and the remaining needs in San Jose de Bocay.

Participants say they have come back eager to begin raising awareness and funds to help the up to 5,000 residents who have survived civil war and natural disasters and to build a better a future through education and environmentally sustainable development.

"They aren't sitting still and talking about what they don't have and how bad things are," Planning Commissioner Mary Holliman said. "They are busy doing things."

One of those things is a project to install solar panels on outlying farmsteads to provide electricity so rural children can do schoolwork at night, Holliman said.

Another is to help rebuild and secure the school in Bocay and to support further education for its teachers.

Last month's trip was sponsored by the Blacksburg-based Coalition for Justice and Green Empowerment, a nonprofit based in Portland, Ore., that raises funds and facilitates construction of renewable energy and water systems in Central America and Asia.

But the Sister City relationship began in the mid-1980s, as Virginia Tech campus minister Woody Leach organized trips to war-torn areas of Central America, including northern Nicaragua.

Visitors from Blacksburg returned home and raised money for a school building, which was dedicated in 1991.

By 2007, 750 students were reported to be attending the school. But a flood later that year damaged several of the classrooms. The community is still struggling to recover.

To date, the Sister City program has contributed about $125,000 to Bocay for school construction and supplies and teacher training.

"We started giving scholarships to keep teachers there who had risked their lives to teach in Bocay during the war," Montgomery County School Board member and Sister City veteran Phyllis Albritton said.

Many of those teachers have continued to work in Bocay, she said.

And there have been other improvements. In 1994, a micro-hydroelectric power system was completed. Later, a hotel opened. By 2002, several homes had been rehabilitated and a dentist office had opened.

Over the years, communication between Blacksburg and Bocay slowly eroded after the program's American contact in Nicaragua, Gary Hicks, left for Costa Rica.

But the recent delegation has found several contacts, including the newly elected mayor. The town even has one computer that can send and receive e-mail, which the Sister City committee hopes will facilitate easier and more frequent communication.

That communication will be important as the group begins a push next month to raise funds to send more of the village's teachers to accreditation classes, Webb said.

Helping the school children achieve an education became a priority for the late Derek Myers, a Blacksburg councilman and civic leader who died suddenly Monday of a strep infection.

Before returning home, Holliman said Myers told her if the group didn't continue to work on the school project, "we'll lose a whole generation of children."

To donate or to volunteer, contact Clark Webb at clark_webb@msn.com.