Epilogue: Giving back in Nicaragua

Dear Friends and Family,

                Thank you again so much for the support during my time in Nicaragua.  Many of you contacted me through my blog or after talking to my parents and asked how you could help the people of Nicaragua.   I apologize for not getting this note together sooner, but here is my response!

                Before I start, there is truly no pressure here.  The world has so many important causes, and I know that all of you support organizations that are meaningful to you in your own lives.  I just want to make this information available to those of you who might be interested in helping.

                The programs and people presented below are very near and dear to my heart, and they are places that my family, Kathy Thornhill, and I have been able to continue supporting from afar.  If you’re interested in making a donation, these are all options for how you could help.  Many thanks again to those of you who have already made generous donations of clothing and money to the pregnancy support group.

                One nice thing about donating to Nicaragua is that a relatively small amount of money by U.S. standards can make such a HUGE difference in Nicaragua.  Take a peek!

SPONSOR A CHILD TO SCHOOL

Junieth (girl in pink) and Bryan (boy in green) with several other health promoters' kids

               Meet Junieth and Bryan, 11 and 10 years old, siblings from the community where I did the majority of my work.  They are the children of Alison, a community health promoter who has taken an active role in the pregnancy support group.  In many respects, Junieth and Bryan are normal, carefree kids who love playing baseball, dancing, and clamoring like monkeys up the tree in front of their house.  In the present economic situation, however, times have been tough for their family.  Work is slow for their father, and the small amount of supplemental income Alison was bringing in by selling snack foods diminished to nothing.  Money has been tight for awhile now (most days last year the kids went to school without breakfast), and the worsening economy meant that this year Alison couldn’t afford to send Junieth and Bryan to school.

                This is an unfair and devastating situation for any 11 and 10 year olds, but especially so for these kids, who live in a community called El Pantanal—literally meaning “the swamp”—a place where they’ve learned to accept realities like houses of cardboard and tin, drug deals on the corner, gang-related violence, and weekly pesticide sprays to combat cockroaches.  Junieth rattles off a list of the drugs sold on her street as effortlessly as if they were her ABCs.  Even so, she has such a sweet childish innocence, turning the neighborhood chemical sprays into an occasion for a silly song and dance routine: Vamos a matar cucharachas!  She bounces up and down, singing, “We’re going to kill cockroaches!”

                Staying in school represents the only hope Junieth and Bryan and other neighborhood kids have to build a brighter future.  A good education means finding a stable job, earning a steady income, and moving to a better, safer neighborhood.  The good news is that the Nicaraguan government pays for the education of all Nicaraguan kids.  However, families are required to provide uniforms and school supplies, and those are prohibitively expensive for many families from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

                My family and the Thornhills are sponsoring Junieth and Bryan for this school year, but there are several more health promoters who have asked for help for their kids.  We chose to concentrate on the promoters’ kids first because we know each of these women to be hard-working, dedicated moms who are committed to emotionally supporting their children through as much education as possible.

                For $50, you can sponsor a child in school for one year.  That money buys a pair of sturdy shoes, a uniform (shirt and undershirt, skirt/pants, and socks), a backpack, notebooks, and pencil/pens.

SPONSOR A WEEK/MONTH OF PREGNANCY SUPPORT GROUP MEETINGS

At a meeting of the pregnancy support group

                I wrote in my blog about the pregnancy support group, a project that I started back in April with several pregnant women in El Pantanal.  I am happy to report that the group is still going strong today, now run by health promoters from the community.  The group continues to provide health information and a social outlet each week.  They even play fun games like charades!  Some of the “graduates” of the group have started making their own presentations to new mothers in the local hospital about the benefits of breast-feeding.

                When the pregnancy support group was newly-formed, there were moments when I doubted the sanity of what I was doing.  More often than not, these were the moments when I was lugging several one-gallon jugs of water one mile on foot and then another 20 minutes perched precariously in the aisle of a dipping, swerving, lurching bus.  However, a big turning point in the group came for me when a shy, unassuming participant approached me and asked to talk.  She was 16 years old and 7 months pregnant, and she was so quiet during meetings that I could never tell if she was engaged with the health chat or not.  I didn’t know anything about her story until that day, when she told me that her parents left for Costa Rica when she was six years old, and she hadn’t seen them since.  Her grandparents raised her, but recently disowned her because they didn’t approve of her boyfriend, who used to be physically abusive to her.  He had apparently gotten his act together, and now she was pregnant with his child.  My mind was reeling with this information, and I didn’t know what to do but listen, and then she said to me, “This meeting is the one time all week when I can forget about the other problems of my life.  I don’t think about my grandparents or my boyfriend or how I’m going to get dinner, I can focus on the health information and find support from my own community.  Thank you for that opportunity.”

                That was when I realized that the pregnancy group may seem to me like just a drop in the ocean, but as Mother Teresa said, the ocean would be less for missing that drop.  I think that the group has become something in which the women take tremendous pride and enjoyment.  For $15, you can sponsor a meeting of the pregnancy group (or a month of meetings for $60).  The money covers a healthy snack for the approximately 40-60 women who attend each meeting.  Everyone receives fresh bread, a piece of fruit, and a healthy drink (either milk or homemade fruit juice).  The two community members who are in charge of making and bringing the snack for that week also receive a small stipend from the $15.

CONTRIBUTE TO THE SALARY/MEDICATION FUND OF A RURAL DOCTOR

Doctor Robles at work

                To reach the community of San Blas, you must take a dusty, bumpy 20-minute ride in a mototaxi past shacks of tin and cardboard, the stench of burning garbage choking the air.  The first time I visited the community to see its health clinic, I had no idea what to expect.  I was surprised and incredibly impressed to find the cleanest, best maintained clinic I’d seen in Nicaragua.  Funded by donations from Spain, the clinic shares a building with a preschool, computer classroom, a medication dispensary, and an unfinished lab and labor and delivery room.  The heart and soul of this organization is Maria Luisa, one of the few people from San Blas ever to earn a college-level education.  Instead of moving to the city to find a profitable job, Maria Luisa returned to her community of San Blas to teach at the school and manage this health clinic.

                The clinic’s doctor is a truly remarkable man named Moises Robles.  From a background of poverty himself, he earned a medical degree with a lot of hard work and sheer grit, and decided that he wanted to use his ability to help the poorest, most vulnerable patients.  I can’t think of many doctors who would willingly do what Doctor Robles does day in and day out—schlepping through dust or mud to San Blas, caring for patients with parasites and skin diseases and diabetes, and visiting even more rural communities, where he sets up an “office” by borrowing a wooden table in his patient’s front yard.  For this work, Doctor Robles receives a salary of $384 a month, a total of $4600 a year.  He is supporting his family of a wife and three young boys.  He could earn more (although admittedly not much more—all doctors in Nicaragua are poorly compensated) by leaving to work at a government clinic in Granada, but his compassion keeps him in San Blas with the neediest patients.

                He has a gigantic heart without the ego to match.  He cares so deeply for his patients, and yet he is often constrained by the socioeconomic realities of this community.  One day while I accompanied him, we passed a cheerful old lady, who greeted Doctor Robles like an old friend.  She had a severe skin infection on her ankle, but she couldn’t afford the $2 medication to cure the infection so she just had to suffer.  On several other occasions, I witnessed a mother with a sick child wrestle with the choice between buying medicine for the sick child or having enough food for dinner for her family.

                San Blas’s clinic is funded almost exclusively by Spain, which has unfortunately felt the effects of the current economic situation, just as we have in the United States.  Donations have taken a big hit, and they no longer have sufficient funds to cover Doctor Robles’ salary.  Obviously losing him would be catastrophic to the community.  We have begun paying half of his salary each month, and we also have provided some money to start a medication fund that he can use at his discretion to supply medicine to his poorest patients.  Any amount of money will help with Doctor Robles’ salary or medication fund.

MISCELLANEOUS

                In addition to the above ongoing projects, I also wanted to give an option for donations to a “miscellaneous” category for the many random things that inevitably come up.  For example, one of my good friends from El Pantanal has an eight-year old daughter named Dachely who was born with incomplete fusion of her spine.  This little girl is as sweet as can be but requires a significant amount of extra care.  Raising a child with disabilities is a challenge even in the best circumstances, and the sacrifices that Dachely’s mother has made to give her daughter the best care possible are truly humbling.  Some of the donated money went to help this family buy basic food staples for several weeks (at a price of about $8/week).  Recently, my friend had an opportunity to join her husband in Costa Rica, where he has been working to make money to send home to Nicaragua, and so we also purchased their bus tickets to move to Costa Rica.

Dachely's mom, Dachely, and me

                Nicaragua is full of inspiring people, and I encountered a truly remarkable woman in rural, northern Nicaragua.  Dochyta works as an orthopedic nurse, and does her best to provide top quality care to her patients despite hospital infrastructure that is literally crumbling.  Theirs is the only major hospital left in Nicaragua with walls of adobe, and the walls are collapsing in some areas.  As unthinkable as this is, when I arrived to Dochyta’s ward at the hospital, they did not have a single bed sheet.  Unless the families brought sheets from home, patients were placed directly onto the plastic mattresses.  Several kind people from Davis made a donation to outfit the hospital with 100 sheets, and Dochyta and the hospital director personally made the trips to the fabric stores to insure that they were getting the best possible deal.  They were so grateful for the help, and told us that they were happiest of all for the patients, who would now benefit from these more dignified conditions.

Dochyta in front of Ocotal's hospital, where she works as a nurse

                And finally, as anyone who visited my house last year is well aware, a massive clothing donations campaign essentially invaded our dining room.  We bundle up quality clothing for Nicaraguan children and bring it to the places with the highest need, for distribution by people that I know and trust.  In many of these communities, people get skin rashes and allergies because they have one set of clothing, and no viable options for washing it.  Each bundle we create has new or gently used shorts/pants, a matched shirt, and new underwear.  Many Nicaraguan people take great pride in their appearance, and prioritize getting nice-looking clothing for themselves and their children.

Mom handing out clothing at the first distribution!

 

Thanks so much for taking the time to look through these options.  We are travelling to Nicaragua again in May, and we plan to bring about 700 more clothing bundles, donated medical supplies, and toys for children.  This trip will also be a perfect opportunity to check on the projects we have in place.

                If you are interested in donating, please contact me for more information.  We have an account set up at First Northern Bank exclusively for donations, and I can personally promise that every dollar will go to organizations and projects in Nicaragua that I know and trust.  Sorry, we aren’t a non-profit (yet!), so the contributions aren’t technically tax deductible.  Please feel free to share this information with friends who might be interested.  Muchas gracias!

Swan Song

January 10, 2010- Adios USA!

                Just over ten months ago, my plane’s wheels bumped down in Nicaragua and my fellow passengers responded with hearty applause.  The clapping seemed a great omen to start the trip, until my Nicaraguan neighbor commented, “I never know if they do that because they’re happy to be home or because they’re relieved that the plane didn’t crash.”

                Many people have commented to me that taking off for Nicaragua by myself was brave.  Reflecting back on that first day in country, I think I was probably about 20% brave and 80% naïve.  However, I’m now grateful for that naïveté because the experience turned out to be one of the most memorable that I’ve had.

                Over the course of ten months, I saw many other students from the U.S., Canada, and Europe come and go.  Some of them expressed to me a reluctance to leave, and a realization that they didn’t know exactly what was pulling them back to their home—why not just settle in Nicaragua indefinitely?  I will be honest and admit that Nicaragua did not leave that impression on me.  There are several reasons why, after ten months, I was relieved to leave Nicaragua.  However, there are an equal number of reasons that I want to continue visiting Nicaragua whenever I am able.

 Things I wasn’t sad to leave behind in Nicaragua:

1. Trash

Trash clogged street of Pantanal

 

One of my first impressions of Nicaragua while driving from the airport to my homestay was garbage.  Garbage everywhere.  Soda bottles lining street gutters, discarded household items like old shoes baked into dirt roads, plastic bags spilling out of potholes, candy wrappers strewn around the central park, people leaning out of bus windows to throw away their food wrappers.  I have such a greater appreciation now for the fact that people do not litter very often in the U.S., and when they do, it carries a social stigma.

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2. Popping Pepto Bismol pills like candy

Elizabeth Gilbert jokes about those travelers “so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick.”  She admits that she’s not one of them, and as it turns out, I’m not either.  Easily the most frustrating aspect of my Nicaragua experience was not feeling well.

Low point. Really low point. Thanks for the pic, Mom.

I’ve made an effort to avoid complaining about the health issues, but I will say that the laundry list of everything I encountered in ten months is a bit overwhelming: three hours of the most miserable food poisoning I could imagine, intestinal parasites a whopping seven times, an equal number of antibiotic courses that were sometimes worse than the parasite, collecting stool samples more times than I can count on both hands (it never gets any less humiliating…), hundreds of mosquito bites, World War III apparently taking place inside my intestines, passing out on a grubby bathroom floor, enduring a scary lightheaded feeling almost daily for ten months, and being diagnosed with what the doctor thought was an abdominal aneurysm that might spontaneously explode and kill me later in life.  Thank goodness, as it turns out, I don’t have an aneurysm, but instead a rare but inconsequential anatomical abnormality where one of my renal veins passes underneath the aorta instead of over it.  As if we needed more proof that I’m one in a million…

3. Climate challenges

Nicaragua 1, Pants 0

 The humid heat of Nicaragua meant that stickiness was a 24/7 affair: walking, sitting, eating, working, cramming into taxis, even stepping out of the shower.

Another downside to the humidity was a rather unfortunate mold problem, which claimed as a victim my formerly lovely capris.

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4. A culture of machismo

No walk down the street in Granada was complete without them: “Pssst, hey princess, hey white-y.  I want you, I love you.  Beautiful, sexy.”  They are called piropos, basically cat-calls, and they are fair game from any man, young or old, alone or in a group, walking or riding a bicycle with a 4-year old son sitting on the handlebars.  There are also the leering stares, the feeling of being undressed by his eyes and objectified, whether you’ve indicated any interest or not.  I learned in my first week that making eye contact with most guys is a come-on, and offering a smile or a friendly greeting is basically akin to an invitation into your bedroom, judging by the lewd suggestions that he calls after you as you pass.

In a more general sense, living with machismo meant that many, if not most, of the women who I got to know endured difficult home lives, best case scenario perhaps assuming the lion’s share of housework, but worst case scenario enduring physical and verbal abuse, adultery, and abandonment.  Based on education level and social capital, most of the women I knew were effectively trapped in these situations, and said things such as, “All he’s doing is cheating on me, and he still gives me enough money for food and doesn’t hit me, so I consider myself fortunate.”  It was very depressing but certainly enlightening in helping me appreciate not only the responsible and respectful males in my life but also my opportunity to get an education and career of my own.

5. Cancellations

On one of my first days in country, someone remarked to me that if I planned five things and one of them worked out as planned, I should consider that a good success rate.  She was exaggerating, but not by much.  In certain moments of frustration, I contemplated changing the byline of my blog to “Nicaragua: the Land of Lateness and Cancellations.”

6. Homesickness

Missing friends and family back home never went away, not after 10 days, not after 10 weeks, not after 10 months.  As someone who depends a lot on her support networks, the distance was a big challenge.  Visits from friends and family were definite highlights!

Mom, Dad, Katrina, and our guide exploring a massive ant hill on my parent's first visit

Katrina stayed for a month after my parents left to live with me, and she did some great work with an environmental organization

Will and I on a hike in San Juan del Sur

 

On his own travels in Nicaragua, Thad came for my 23rd birthday party!

 

Mom and Kathy with a few of the donations they and my dad brought, on our way to a party in the community where I work!

 

Naomi and I zip-lining on a volcano!

 

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 Things I will miss from Nicaragua:

1. People

People may as well be items #1-6 on this list, or #1-100 for that matter, because the truth is that my relationships with the people of Nicaragua are what made this experience for me.  Here are a few of the people who I consider very important:

My incredible host mom Coco, and her children

All of the promoters

I will miss San Blas and Dr. Moises (he's demonstrating how he used to use his cell phone light to look in patients' throats and ears before my parents and Kathy brought him equipment)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yader and Alberto, among my few friends over age 17 who weren't married with kids!

 

Making necklaces with Maria Haydee- I will miss all of Coco's grandkids

The kids in Pantanal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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k2.  Chaos

The Ruta approaches

Amidst the unpredictability and craziness of working in Nicaragua, there was never a dull moment.  My particular favorite was the morning commute.  At one site where I worked, the trip was made either by mototaxi (small vehicle resembling a golf cart) or motorcycle.  Either option was equally exciting; on days with rain, the mototaxi driver would hesitate a moment before plunging into deep puddles of what looked like chocolate milk, on one memorable occasion so deep that the water flooded the floor where my feet rested.  The motorcycle ride meant clutching for dear life a handsome, compassionate doctor who is probably already my husband in a parallel universe.  Working at the other site meant arriving in a small bus, which would sometimes get packed so full with passengers that you didn’t even have to worry about holding yourself up, since the bulk of your fellow passengers did the job for you, all of you swaying in and out of the potholes in unison.  I will never forget that chaos and excitement.

3. Weekly meetings with the pregnancy group

The pregnancy group... who can spot me?

Starting a pregnancy support group in a setting of such extreme poverty is probably my proudest accomplishment to date.  I valued every moment of working with these courageous and spirited women, and my greatest pride comes from the fact that the leaders and participants alike are committed to continue the weekly meetings long after my departure.

4.  Colors

Two neighboring houses

The colors in Nicaragua are amazing: houses, churches, fruits, and candies all come in vibrant blues and purples, vivid yellows and pinks, and eye-popping oranges and teals.  And I love it.  I’m now determined to be that crazy neighbor with a bright periwinkle house that everyone else on the street complains about but secretly envies.

5. Warm weather

I know I’ve complained a lot about the humidity in Nicaragua, but the truth is that I’m a girl who would a thousand times rather be hot than cold.  To be coming home mid-November, at the very cusp of the winter season, with four long months of cold weather ahead of me, is just gloomy.

6. Sunsets

Sunset is one of the loveliest times of day in Nicaragua, when the air finally cools off and people emerge from their houses to sit on their front stoops, laughing and talking and gossiping with neighbors.  The sun sinks lower and lower, tingeing the sky with streaks and smears of purple, orange, and pink for a few brief moments until it disappears entirely.

On my last day in Granada, I treated the promoters to ice cream and then bid them a final, wrenching farewell.  I climbed up the tight, spiraling staircase of the nearest church’s bell tower for one last view of my beautiful Granada.  The promoters had waited on the street below to see me up at the top, and I waved furiously and blew kisses until the last of them turned the corner out of sight.  I stayed at the top for a long, sad time, drinking in my last views of the city and avoiding the large, boisterous tour group from Sweden who probably worried I was about to throw myself off the tower.  It seemed all I could do was take photo after photo of my beloved yellow church, unable to tell if the pictures were turning out or not because my eyes were blurred with tears.

Granada's Central Cathedral

Then the gigantic bell began tolling, with a thunderous noise so loud I jumped in surprise and immediately jammed my fingers in my ears.  The tower’s balcony was vibrating, the air was thrumming, and a flock of pigeons soared away from the church’s roof to land on a nearby building.  I watched the sun set on my final day in Granada.  In a movie-perfect moment, just as the last sliver of sun dropped below the horizon, the bell’s final vibrations faded from the air.  Noises from the street began filtering back up: horns honking, children laughing, food vendors hawking their wares.  I turned away, wiping the tears from my eyes, and descended down the staircase, ready for my flight back home.

 

Chasing away the Monday blues

I hope I’m not overwhelming anyone by posting two days in a row, but I was going through photos and found a few that just needed to be shared.  Many of you know Naomi, my wonderful friend who came to visit me in October.  As often happens when the two of us get together, many photos were taken.  In fact, I discovered a self-timer camera setting where it automatically takes ten photos in a row.  The following photos come from one such photo shoot.  I’ve presented them in large size so you can appreciate the facial expressions.  When I first saw the sequence, I couldn’t quite piece together what had happened…

However, after my initial confusion, I remembered the sequence of events.  The first shot catches Naomi just moments before her hand gets hit by the rotating blades of the ceiling fan (not visible in the photo).  The next photo catches her dismay, and then the final shot captures my rather unsympathetic reaction.

I hope that other people find this sequence as funny as I do.  I spent a good ten minutes cracking up over the pictures, so I thought I’d share.  I will leave you with one final photo, one that immediately followed the previous three, where Naomi bravely goes for a jump again but this time is considerably more cautious in her hand placement.

A Lesson in Geography

An actual recent conversation between Coco and I:

Coco: Jessie, one of the other students who lived here was from Canada but he had never been to Niagara Falls.  Is Canada a large place?

Me: Yes, Canada is very large compared to Nicaragua.  Probably he lived far away from Niagara Falls.  Actually, sometimes I think that Nicaraguans don’t understand how big Canada and the United States are.  Today a man asked me if my house in California is located close to Miami!  Maybe people get confused between California and Florida.

Coco: Oh yes, well that’s because California is on the Atlantic side.

Me: Oh, actually, that’s Florida.  California is on the Pacific side.  But they are far apart, in fact about as far away as from Nicaragua to California.

Coco: Yes, I’ve heard that the flight from here to San Francisco is very far.  The first time I was ever in California was in San Antonio, Texas.

Me: Wait, what?

Coco: When I entered the United States, we were in San Antonio, Texas.  And that was my first time in California.

Me: Coco, San Antonio, Texas is in…well, Texas.  Texas is a different state from California.

Coco: Oh, so then Texas is next to Florida.

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I know any Nicaraguan would wipe the floor with me in a Nicaragua Geography Bee.  It’s just nice to be considered somewhat of an expert in U.S. geography here.  As opposed to my life in California, where people still tease me about my perfectly understandable geography mix-ups (as it turns out, Spain is NOT located in South America, and islands don’t float).  Like I said, perfectly understandable.

Anyways, 300 days ago yesterday, my plane touched down in Nicaragua to begin this adventure.  Those of you who know that I lack any sort of directional ability will sympathize with the nerves I had about navigating a completely new city.  Imagine my dismay when I found out that Nicaraguans hardly ever use street names, don’t have street numbers of any kind, and most commonly give directions using compass directions and landmarks.  And if you don’t feel like saying North or East, it’s perfectly acceptable to say, for example, “towards the lake.”  The best part of all is that often the landmarks are places that have since burned down or moved.  So a typical direction you might get would sound something like, “From the burned down church, 3 blocks toward the lake and 25 meters oriental.”

I won’t pretend like I’ve become a human version of google maps, but I’m holding out hope that my directional abilities have improved slightly.  That being said, I’m not going to be entering any U.S. geography bees soon, unless of course the topic is California/Florida coastal placement.

Down on Chilo’s farm

During my time in northern Nicaragua, I visited a cool farm run by a great guy named Chilo.  In order to reach the farm, we had to roll up our pants and wade across a river more than 30 feet wide!  The previous day Chilo had made the trip and the water came up to his armpits, but fortunately when we crossed the water came up just thigh-high.  Chilo and his family are from Mexico, and he’d tried communal farming in southern California for awhile.  Now in Nicaragua, he hoped the farm would eventually provide everything that his family needed.  Seeing the plethora of fruits, vegetables, and animals they were already raising (including a tilapia pond!), it wasn’t hard to believe that self-sufficiency was a close reality for them.

My favorite butterfly

When life gives you really big lemons…

One of the yummiest vegetables here, called chayote and basically just a squash

One last spider on our way out

Eating a banana literally fresh off the tree! I won’t lie, it tasted like any other banana I’ve ever eaten.

Flower and moth

Glass wing butterfly, you can see right through it!

Tiny peppers

I mean, I don’t want to brag or anything, but how cool is this photography?!

Bird of paradise

A spider (entomologists, is this a tarantula?) believed in this culture to crawl into the hooves of cattle and urinate, thereby causing the animal’s foot to rot away

Chilo and his five year old son

Gorgeous Bougainvillea (Yes, I had to wikipedia that to spell it)

On a regular basis in Nicaragua, I have humbling experiences that make me wonder what having a college degree actually signifies.  Sometimes I joke that my BA is basically an expensive piece of paper that means I have no practical life skills (ask me about the time I realized that I barely knew how to use a mop…).  Anyways, at this farm in the middle of rural Nicaragua, I had one of the most amazing experiences of my entire ten months, probably my life.  I was eating a lunch of rice, beans, tortillas, and chayote with Dochyta (my northern Nicaragua host mom) and Chilo.  As we sat around the roughly-hewn wooden table, Chilo started speaking articulately about the power that a single conscientious person has to effect positive change on the world.  I am ashamed to admit that based on nothing more than the dirt beneath his fingernails and his seemingly isolated existence, I had made certain assumptions about his level of literacy and eloquence.  And yet he started referencing policies and politicians to support his points–not just examples from Mexico or Nicaragua but also from Chile, Guatemala, Russia, and the United States–events I’d never even heard of, despite my golden college degree.  Dochyta and I chimed in and we all discussed structural adjustment policies, the World Bank, U.S. immigration policy, the concept of democracy, and everything in between.  The discussion was more profound than anything I ever experienced in a classroom, more so because we were seemingly so different: a Mexican farmer, a Nicaraguan nurse, and a U.S. student, sharing rice, beans, and modest ideas about how to make the world a more just place.  I never expected these moments when I started this journey, but ultimately I can’t imagine my experience without them.

Chilo and his five year old son

Materials for a day of surveying:

A pack of tissues (for runny noses or emergency toilet paper)

Hand sanitizer

Pharmacy condensed into one pill bottle (just to give you an idea of the various ailments that might strike, my bottle has Ibuprofen, Tylenol, anti-diarrheal, decongestant, Pepto Bismol, a general anti-cold/flu medicine, and Advil PM.  Also a couple of band-aids stuffed on top.)

Cell phone (pay-as-you-go here, so ideally you’ve remembered to load some minutes on your card)

Umbrella (no matter how sunny it looks when you leave the house in the morning)

Chapstick

Hot-pink pepper spray (to humor your mom, also because hot-pink pepper spray is a perfect balance of girly and bad-ass)

Blank surveys and a folder for completed surveys

A clipboard and pens

Water (definitely more than one bottle, ideally somewhere around 4, especially if you’re like me and have discovered that your sensitive stomach does not appreciate Nicaraguan microorganisms or the water in Pantanal, which has a flavor reminiscent of liquid chalk)

Snacks (including extra of everything, to share!)

Sweat rag (you can surreptitiously dab your face before your Nicaraguan counterparts start commenting about how much Americans sweat)

A Day in the Life

A meeting of the Pantanal pregnancy support group

The budding conspiracy theorists among you have begun whispering that in eight months, I’ve never blogged about what exactly it is that I do here day-to-day.  Fair enough.  Since February, I’ve been working in the community of Pantanal which I described in a previous blog entry.  Through July, I worked with a really fun doctor named Doctora Alguera, who took it upon herself to teach me as much as she could.  I learned basics like taking blood pressure and measuring respiration rate, and for pregnant patients she also taught me to count the fetal heart beat through a stethoscope and to measure fundal height.  After a couple months, she had me taking patient histories all by myself.  They were big responsibilities and I felt very grateful to the community members for trusting me with their health.

All pregnant patients receive a card to track their prenatal appointments, and one of the adolescent mothers decorated her card in pinks, blues, and purples, like a schoolgirl doodling in class. I couldn't help thinking, she's a kid having a kid.

Working in Pantanal’s health center involves confronting difficult and sometimes depressing realities.  On one particular day, we saw two pregnant patients in a row, each 15 years old, and each significantly underweight for where she should have been at that stage in her pregnancy.  One of them had actually lost weight since her previous appointment a month earlier.  The doctor gave a standard spiel about nutrition, and then asked the patient why she’d been losing weight.  Staring down at her ragged skirt, the young girl admitted that her family did not have money for milk and fruits and vegetables as the doctor suggested, and sometimes they didn’t even have enough to buy beans and therefore made do only with a small amount of rice.

Giving a presentation about nutrition during pregnancy. Many of the women don't read, so I relied on my artistic abilities, which are roughly equivalent to those of a third-grader.

The experience affected me strongly and I couldn’t put it out of my mind.  Every factor of the patient’s life—her age, education level, risk-level of the pregnancy, socioeconomic status—seemed to magnify the bleakness of the situation.  I couldn’t help but reflect on the significant worries of my own life at fifteen: whether or not I’d make the tennis team, my incurable band camp crush, and earning an A from my prickly English teacher.  I can’t imagine facing at that age the stress of becoming a young mother, compounded by an economic reality which renders basics like fruit and milk unaffordable.

Me, Doctora Alguera, and Chelcy arriving in Pantanal for a birthday party for one of our patients

I had an idea to start a pregnancy support group, a place where pregnant women could come once a week to receive a healthy snack and information about various health topics, such as nutrition for expectant mothers, breast-feeding techniques, and warning signs during pregnancy.  With support from the doctor and another intern named Chelcy, the group came to fruition.  Although they both left after a couple weeks, now I collaborate with health promoters from the community.  The pregnancy group started in early April, and I am proud to report that now, in mid-September, we’re going stronger than ever.

Me with all the health promoters and a few of their kids. From left, Blanca, Rosario, Mariluz, Yorleni, Mercedes, Alison, and Fatima. Don't worry, they're happy, it's just not typical to smile in photos here! They all pitched in to buy the necklace I'm wearing, which is made out of beautiful wooden beads, and one of the promoter's daugthers made it.

                During months of trial and error, we made lots of mistakes and learned from most of them.  We’ve come a long way since our humble beginnings (ideally, you would imagine the following highlights set to a romantic comedy-type musical montage, soundtrack: The Beatles’ With a Little Help from My Friends): we started making milk from soy beans instead of powder (more sustainable and a fraction of the cost), we expanded the group to include breast-feeding mothers as well and grew from 15 members to around 50, we attracted positive attention from the Ministry of Health, who sent a health educator to several of our meetings, and we received support from Vision Mundial (an international NGO).

My adorable sis and some of the finished products

              Working in a country like Nicaragua is often interesting and never dull.  Take, for example, the morning commute.  To this week’s meeting, I brought a backpack full of framed photos (my wonderful family has supported me in countless ways throughout my time here, and my mom and sister did a photo project where Katrina took pictures of the women in the group with their kids and my mom found some really beautiful photo frames at the Dollar Tree.  For some of the women, it was the first photo they had of their children).  Anyways, Coco’s son Jairo saw me leaving with the backpack and kindly offered me a ride.  Things went fine until we got into Pantanal, where the roads are in terrible shape always, and with recent heavy rains even worse than usual.  Several blocks away from the center, Jairo optimistically drove his tiny car straight into a muddy puddle and got stuck.  He managed to round up about 10 guys to help him and they literally shoved his car out of the puddle and back on to normal muddy ground.   I was ready to walk the remaining blocks to the center, but Jairo told me he wouldn’t let me go alone in a dangerous community.  As we debated, a tattooed, muscular guy in a tight tee rode by on a motorcycle and Jairo said, “I know him!  He can give you a ride!”  So I grabbed onto said motorcycle guy’s chiseled chest and showed up to work on the back of his motorbike.  The specifics are not typical, but the adventure aspect certainly is.

Muchacha, papel!

                There are also moments that I couldn’t make up if I tried.  One week I was running around, bringing glasses of milk to the pregnant women when I hear a little girl’s voice call out, “Muchacha, papel” (Hey lady, paper!).  I look to my left and there is a 3-year old who has popped a squat on the sidewalk adjacent to the clinic and is asking—or rather, commanding—me to bring her toilet paper.

                It’s certainly an entertaining job, and one that I love, made all the more rewarding by the fact that the wonderful health promoters have really taken ownership of the group and will continue it well beyond my time here.  Most of these promoters have a sixth grade education, and they are all confronting difficult issues in their personal lives (domestic violence, addictions, malnourished children, threats of eviction, not having enough money to feed their children).  They don’t receive a cent for the hours and hours of work they do, but each one of the women volunteers out of the goodness of her heart and a belief that the members of her community deserve the best opportunities that she can help give them.

Me and Maria Antonia, one of the group members, and her brand new baby daughter

I’m still not exactly sure what I did to deserve such an incredible opportunity working with these promoters and learning from their courage and convictions.  At the end of my time here, I know that these lessons are what I will remember most vividly—not the minor inconveniences, nor the digestive woes, nor the occupational hazards, like getting peed on by babies.  It’s just that sometimes the latter make such funnier photo opportunities…

Baby 1, Jessica 0