You can find the paper: coconut water as monophasic cultive base from trypanosomatidae, parasite of men in Americ

Schneider or RPMI, usually enriched deactivated bovine fetal serum (10-30%)

It is depend on your further application of parasites. If you just need to collect the promastigotes then schneider medium is good. If you have any further application to infect other cells like PEC or other macrophage cell lines like THP1 cells or RAW 264.7 or J774 then definitely you should use RPMI medium.

I am infected THP1 cells with Leishmania donovani and isolating Promastigotes by lysing THP1 cells with 0.05% SDS in RPMI for 30 sec and diluting with complete RPMI.

Here is link for method-

http://www.jove.com/video/4054/a-parasite-rescue-transformation-assay-for-antileishmanial-screening

Dear Job, In our lab we usually use Schneider's medium supplemented with 5% FBS + 2% of human urine and it works nice. However there are some fastidious Leishmania isolates that are difficult to growth in vitro. An other useful medium is NNN with an overlay of Schneider's medium.

Dear Job

This is important; neither Scneider nor RPMI are recommended for primary isolation of leishmania. 3N medium so far the the best and recommended medium.

RPMI and Schneider both are used for cultivating and propagating leishmania in the lab but not isolation from clinical samples.