Robert Drew High School prepares to graduate its third class of students.
MERIDA, NICARAGUA – There’s a glass case at an Ometepe high school packed with keepsakes remembering a late Bainbridge Island resident.
His old catcher’s mitt, a favorite T-shirt and a portrait of his smiling face are held under lock and key.
But the greatest honor for former Bainbridge-Ometepe Sister Islands Association board member Robert Drew is in the school’s name.
“We named our school after Robert Drew because Bainbridge answered our call,†Principal Jose Efrain said. “We had no high school here, making things very hard for the people of Merida.
“The support we received from Bainbridge to change that was enormous.â€
Four years ago, BOSIA contributed more than $14,000 to build the village’s first high school. The four-room school was named after Drew, who died that same year of a brain tumor.
Drew’s widow, Peggy Drew, then chipped in a few thousand dollars more to build an additional classroom and the school’s library.
Now the rooms are full of fresh-faced students in blue and white uniforms, on track for the school’s third wave of graduates.
“I was there for the first graduation,†said Peggy Drew of her trip to Ometepe in 2003. “You could definitely tell how proud they all were. The girls wore green dresses, the boys all wore white. They had me up on the stage, posing with every student and parent and relative.
“The whole town was there. I’ve never had my picture taken more than on that day.â€
The community of 3,000 people was celebrating more than just the class of ’03. They were commemorating a new institution that carries strong hopes for the entire town.
“We are very rural here and far from other towns,†Efrain said. “There is much illiteracy and few have gone to school. But now some are going to university. They have the opportunity to become doctors, nurses, teachers and so they want to study hard. We hope they will come back to Merida, where they are very much needed.â€
The village of Merida is defined by a sparsely populated dirt road leading to Lake Nicaragua’s shore. An old coffee plantation no longer ships from the crumbling lakeside dock, and many of the village’s residents scrape by as subsistence farmers or laborers.
The economic pressure is great on many of Merida’s children to remain in the fields with their parents. In the 1990s, those who could attend school often didn’t make it past the sixth grade.
With no local high school, students had to walk three hours to the town of Balgue to attend classes. Only about 60 students on average would even attempt such a feat each year, according to Efrain, and only six would make it to graduation.
The Robert Drew High School changed all that. More than 160 students packed the school last week, absorbing physics, math, English and history in class.
“The school has changed us a lot,†Efrain said. “Now we have very few cases of illiteracy in our children.â€
Physics teacher Marvin Potoy said he was proud to see 18 seniors graduate last year.
“That was just not a possibility before,†he said. “Now we can provide the basic services and we have made such progress.â€
Peggy Drew said her husband would be proud of his association with a school that’s changing lives on Ometepe.
Born in California and educated at Whitworth College in Spokane, Robert Drew was a Methodist minister for 28 years.
He retired in 1995, and the couple moved to Bainbridge Island, where he volunteered with BOSIA and Seabold United Methodist Church’s youth programs.
“He absolutely loved young people and spent his entire life making things better for them,†said Peggy Drew. “He believed strongly in the importance of education and in the difference it can make.
“He would be so honored to see what is happening at that school and so proud to see how it is changing that community.â€
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The series
Staff writer Tristan Baurick is back on Bainbridge after a three-week sojourn to the island of Ometepe, Nicaragua, to look at Bainbridge’s longtime sister island and report on that program’s effects on the Nicaraguan community.
