Compas de Nicaragua, meaning Friends of Nicaragua, is a dancing group with a compelling story.

Named Las Hijas de Maiz, the Daughters of the Corn, the dancers are six young women from the settlement of La Primavera, one of the most impoverished neighborhoods of Managua, the nation’s capital. They came to the northeast of the United States to share their dance with schools and colleges.

The 2013 tour was the group’s fourth in the United States. Since early September they’ve clicked their heels and swayed their hips on stages across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, finally making it to JSC’s Dibden stage on Thursday, Oct. 17.

The dance costumes ranged from brightly-colored flared dresses of Spanish influence to blue-jeans and cowboy hats. But behind the swirls and twirls of smiling exotic-looking dancers is a deeper story of the hardships of the Nicaraguan people. To tell it, Compas used film clips in-between routines.

“We want to share our mission with people, and dance is a great way to do that,” said Michael Boudreau, executive director of the organization, and who traveled the northeastern states with the girls. “People will come out to see dancers.”

According to its website, its mission is “to promote cultural exchange and improve lives through service trips and sustainable community development.”

The group is a non-profit that works with volunteers from the U.S. and the community members of Managua to improve the living conditions and economy of poor parts of Nicaragua.

Compas’ project coordinator and dance choreographer, Ana Narvaez, is also president of Women in Action, a group that Boudreau said Compas works closely with.

In La Primavera, he said, women with little or no education are often the sole providers for their families and work can be hard to come by.

Out of the $12,000 the group will have raised on this tour, Boudreau said after the expenses of the dancers has been paid, there will only be a few thousand left over to go to the WIA program.

But he hopes people meeting the girls and attending the dances with the informative film will motivate them to help in some way.

Meanwhile, the girls are getting the experience of living, briefly, in a world so unlike the one they were raised.

With the help of a translator, two of the girls shared some of what they are learning while on tour.

One of the dancers, Pamela Trujillo, struggled to find things in the U.S. that reminded her of her home. She said someone considered low-income here would be considered “comfortable” back there.

“The strangest thing,” she said, “is how back in Nicaragua we visit each other all the time. Here everyone lives in their own little world. There’s not a lot of community.”

Fellow dancer Bianka Gurdian agreed.

“This makes me appreciate my culture more,” she said, “in how people treat each other, and our family values.”

Culture, community, and family are fundamental values, Boudrea said. His project coordinator talked a little about her frustration over what she sees as the loss of Nicaraguan traditions.

“If you have a culture like ours,” she said, “don’t change that – because it’s something unique. If you change that, you are changing us.”

She described the dance as a combination of native traditions from hundreds of years ago mixed with Spanish and Catholic influence.

Over the course of the tour she’s met people who were born in her home nation, but was disappointed to learn that none of them were familiar with the traditional songs or dances from their birthplace – both which are dear to Narvaez’s heart.

“The song I love most is called ‘Bird of Peace,’” she said. “In that song we ask God for peace to change the situations of the exploited, those taken advantage of, and those who need.”

Every time her dancers are on stage performing this dance, she said, “I feel in my mind and my head I am also asking God. I want peace. I want no wars and no more hungry children. Anytime we dance I am asking God for these small things.”

Life in Nicaragua isn’t easy, Boudreau said. The nation is roughly the size of New York and is located south of Honduras and north of Costa Rica.

The country has endured misfortunes over the last 50 years including a devastating earthquake in 1972, unrelenting hurricanes, deforestation, pollution, government collapse, civil wars, and damaging foreign and domestic policies.

Because of all this, infrastructure for things like sewage has suffered and for years waste water has poured into Lake Managua, earning it the title of “World’s Biggest Toilet” from Nicaraguan journalist José Adán Silva.

But no matter how polluted their lands may have become, Boudreau said it hasn’t polluted their spirit.

“I’m from a blue-collared family, and I didn’t have much growing up,” he said. “While [Nicaraguans] don’t have much materially, they have a lot spiritually. They sleep two or three people in one bed in a one-bedroom house and no one’s complaining.”

Boudreau was raised in New Hampshire, where he said he had grown up with a sense of entitlement.

In his college years he decided to go on a service trip through a program at his school run by Professor Ash Eames, who was also a social activist impassioned to help the Central American people after the political turmoil in the ‘80s.

He found himself returning year after year.

While working with people who he said had less than any poor people he knew back home, he found himself wondering why they were happy and he was not. What did they have that he didn’t, he wondered. The people of La Primavera welcomed him and shared what little they had.

He said they taught him about love, family, and community. Boudreau had gone to Managua intending to teach the people there how to improve their lives. Instead, he said they taught him how to improve his.

“I knew I couldn’t turn my back on what I’d seen,” he said.

In 1999 Boudreau stopped commuting and began living in La Primavera, creating a new headquarters for Compas.

Compas, through social initiatives, focuses on sustainable changes. WIA has several strategies which incorporate the revitalization of native traditions while raising money, which is a double win as Narvaez says influence from other cultures threatens to erase her people’s ethnic characteristics.

The dances are one example of preservation, and the group performs at celebrations in the home country as well as abroad.

Its website also describes a handcraft where members hollow out gourds to sell as spoons, bowls, canteens, or decoration as their ancestors have for “thousands of years.”

Other programs backed by Compas through WIA include: supplemental food sources with soy, no-interest loans for women to start businesses for themselves, creation of “Artisan bags” with recycled plastic bags, and an education program for La Primavera youths funded by U.S. sponsors.

Outside of Managua in La Paz, Carazo, Compas has spent four years supporting Brothers and Sisters in Reconciliation Cooperative. The area is called the “Golden Triangle” and Boudreau described it as having immensely agriculturally rich soil and an important source for water.

His group is helping reforest the area, which has lost a lot of its trees due to farmland taking over or people simply heating their homes with the wood.

According to Boudreau, along with the cooperative, Compas is providing small, interest-free loans to farmers, finding ways to clean used and dirty water to be used again, and using healthy and organic fertilizer to boost coffee, a major product of that area.

To reduce the deforestation of local rainforests in this area, Compas is helping to introduce a new way for locals to cook using bio-gas. The website says this does a number of things: saves the villagers money from having to buy firewood, slows the rainforest depletion, and “[eliminates] harmful wood fire smoke.”

Why does Boudreau involve himself in all of this? He said wants to inspire people to get involved and help those in the world who are struggling to survive. His group hosts service trips and internships, providing a place to stay and food to eat for people who want to get involved.

“There are a lot of problems in this world affecting all of us,” he said. “There’s war. There’s poverty. But we are all one human race. If there’s a solution, it will involve all of us. We all want the same thing – to live with dignity.”