Photos!

I am hoping this will work, but here are some assorted photos from my first few weeks here. Its taken quite a while to upload these.

These are the new Healthy Kitchens (or Clean Air Kitchens as they are changing to being called). We are working on installing these in a number of communities. They cost about $280 in total but cost the people in the communities about $40 to get one and invest in their health and future. The people I know who have them, love them!

We have done a lot of de-parasiting in four of the communities where we work. All of the kids love to see the picture of the worms on the front of the package! They are just two chewable tablets that take care of a wide range of parasites, we try to do this at least twice a year to all the kids at the schools.

This is a photo from one of our pregnancy Charlas (community health lessons) in a village called El Chonco. We do them in the feeding center near the school.

This picture is inside the church at Miguel Cristiano which is a community where we work that is very far North near the Honduran Border. We were there two weeks ago to do a community day which started with a Charla on their soon to be finished water system and water health in the morning for the young people. This was followed by lunch together as a community (talk about feeding hundreds! I was so worried we wouldn't have enough food for the 100+ people we were expecting, silly me, God had it all planned out) and a Charla in the afternoon for the adults over the same topics. They were well attended and seemed to really be of value to the people in the community.

This is one of the beautiful sunsets as seen from the terrace on the roof at the property here in Chinandega.

This is one of the Charlas for the pregnant women in Ste. Matilde. I am working on designing a means of evaluating what the women think of these lessons that will remove as much as possible of the bias in the feedback we have been getting so far. The hope is to make them better for the women and make sure the information is easily accessible to them all.

We did take a little time to go to the beach in our teams here. It was a great and relaxing Wednesday last week. I love my new hammock!

This was from a Charla in Mina de Agua where we were talking about the new kitchens with the people there and then meeting with the CAPs team (in charge of maintaining the water system) to tell them about the OneSight Brigade.

We have had a lot going on in a few short weeks! I can't wait for there the next few!

Directions

Anyone who knows me back in the States knows, I am bad with directions. I need more than just verbal directions to get to somewhere I have never been before. A map, a GPS system and don't worry I can still manage to get lost more times than I would like to admit.

The people who live here have a remarkable sense of direction. I notice rather often as I try and orient myself that there are no addresses in some communities, no house numbers, yet the people who live here, even if they are not from the particular community we are in know where they are going. They know how to get to all the communities Amigos works in (over 100 communities in and around the Western coastline side of Nicaragua mainly with a few dotted closer to the center of the country), and how to follow the directions of community members how to get to certain homes. And trust me, this is an accomplishment because these directions we get in community are very vauge; go that way (insert hand gesture here), down 2 cuadras (sortof like blocks but they are not equivalent in size), then its not the first house but the one on the other side. Good luck! I listen to the first part and get stumped, and its not an uncommon occurrence that the family has moved and the directions aren't quite perfect, but they are generally pretty accurate.
Needless to say its good luck finding places if you are used to living in a place with maps, addresses, concrete directions and GPS systems. I can remember lamenting about not having an exact address for something in the States to plug into my GPS system on multiple occasions, and I know how silly that seems now.

I watch so many great kids back in the States and have a ton of fun doing it! There is one kiddo in particular who I know would find a great challenge to learning directions down here. For those that don't know him, he is a human GPS system. Don't believe me? He spent a morning giving me turn-by-turn directions on how to get to all the places we were going with street names from the third row of the minivan. I was in awe. At first I was thinking that he would despise the Nicaragua style directions, but then I was thinking there is a logical method to understanding them, its just not one I am able to grasp (terrible sense of direction, check!). I bet that if he was living or visiting a place like this for a long time he would have the lay of the land down in no time. As for me, this is my 5th trip to Nicaragua and I have now been here over 2 weeks (so over 9 weeks in total) and can say with all honesty I am glad that I am not responsible for getting myself anywhere solo because I would struggle!

I am also at a point in my life where I am looking for more than just directions to get somewhere, I am looking for a direction for my life to take. That one is a little more challenging to solve. For now I will just stick with trying to learn Nicaraguan directions :)

Where I stay.

So, this post is not as much writing and more pictures. But a picture is worth a thousand words right? I usually get asked about where I stay when I am down here, so I took some pictures of the Amigos for Christ property so that anyone who's interested can see.

This picture shows the boys dorm and bathrooms and San Cristobal Volcano in the background, the other side has dorms that match for the girls.

This is our front gate and the outside of the office

This is our rancho, one of the greatest places to just hang out outside, on the weekends we like to string up our hammocks and watch movies out here. When we have groups, this is where we meet for devotionals.

 

 

 

This is the terrace on top of our kitchen area, its a great place to watch the sunrise or sunset!

Mi cama and most importantly my fans which are awesome!

One example of a beautiful sunset from the terrace

I am terrible at blogging and remembering to blog. I will throw that out there from the start, but I am going to attempt to try and see how things go.

For the topic of my first post, since all I did was not sleep and travel, a lot, here's a little musing I came to while in the midst of my travel.

We, in the United States, live in a culture of fear and distrust. I say fear because there are an abundant number of day to day references to uncertainties and expecting them to come to fruition. We as an American culture believe in insurance, protection from the unexpected, and we always expect the unexpected to happen. Its a big business, one that shows only signs of growth for the future. To drive a car, you must have insurance. To own or rent a home it is highly encouraged, even an ostracizable risk, not to have insurance.

We expect the worst, not the best. This is easily widespread through news and media outlets. The old sentiment "If it bleeds, it leads" still holds true for nearly all news and radio stations and we are as a culture constantly bombarded first with all of the terrible things happening in the world, and then if we stick it out through all of that we may finally get to see something positive.

This is why it is hard for people who rarely travel to see why someone from this fear culture would ever want to go somewhere else to help. "There is so much need here, bad things happen right here in America, why do you have to go to another country to help them?" I get asked this question more often than you would think, and I struggle to explain to people who have not stepped outside of their bubble to see and experience extreme poverty. Once you have seen extreme poverty situations and the people living in them, you will notice that there are few situations as desperate as those going on in developing nations. The breadth of poverty in these places, the sheer number of people affected, the lack of governmental aid and services available to help; add to the structural violence that makes people unable to break free of their cycle of poverty. It is in these situations, where we can provide the most for people in the form of hope. By sitting next to someone when they are concerned for a loved one in the hospital, offering a comforting smile to a passerby, being in the moment with people and sharing their fears, worries and concerns. We can make a difference.

We find hope through companionship, we were not meant to go through life alone. We hold the potential to be a great force of good in this world, both at home and abroad. So what can we do knowing this?

Another disclaimer, I am running on about 4-5 hours of sleep so if this has some rocky spots, bear with me!