Update! What I have been up to for the last 4 weeks!

I realized two things the other day, A. that I am behind on actually posting something for awhile, and B. That I haven't really described what I have been doing since I have been here.

To start off with let me paint the picture, its about 7am and the sun is blazing hot and it gets so hot in your room that you naturally wake up because you feel like you are soaked in your own sweat. Welcome to Nicaragua! Ok, so not all days are that bad, but the weather has been insanely hot compared to the 35 degrees it was when I left Chicago 4 weeks ago. It is usually so hot about 7-8 that you wake up normally, and work starts at 8am usually and goes until about 5 with a break for lunch about 12-1.

I can honestly say that not a single week has been the same, there really isn't such a thing as horrible monotony here in Nicaragua, because you never quite know what is going to happen next. But I will try to touch briefly on a few of the things that I have been doing over the course of the last 4 weeks here.

During the first week I was here, we had a big Charla day in a community called Miguel Cristiano. A charla is translated literally to mean "little chat" but here they mean community health lessons. We left really early (about 645) and packed up our ambulance (essentially a large passenger vehicle with seats that can be folded up) and the trailer we attached to it, and the education and health teams headed out to Miguel Cristiano. This community is about 3 hours or so away and it is one of the harder to get to communities where we work because there is a river we need to cross to get there and they are in the process of building a bridge. Luckily it had been so dry that we could drive right across the riverbed only through about a foot and half or so of water, and river rocks to make it up the hill to the house of one of the village leaders. Then I had one of my first, oh yes I am in Nicaragua experiences as we proceeded to start cooking lunch for about 100 people in the community and ourselves. I looked at the 5-6 carrots, bag of tomatoes, bag of onions, 3-4 peppers, bag of potatoes and tub of chicken legs that we brought and at the 6-7 bags of rice they provided (and the tortillas that came later) and couldn't fathom how we were going to feed that many people! But no one else seemed concerned so I continued to chop vegetables into tiny little pieces with a very dull knife on top of a wooden table behind Don Antonio's house with chickens running around my feet and pigs about 3 feet from where I was sitting. Sound crazy yet? We chopped the veggies and then started sorting the rice, this is something that I have seen people do all the time in Nicaragua, but haven't ever gotten to do and its kind of fun! You dump the bags of rice you bought into a bowl or something and then you sit there and pick out all the pieces that are black or brown or anything that doesn't look like rice (there are hard bits that sneak in every so often) and throw them on the ground, where the chickens eat them like rabid animals. haha After the prep work, we cleaned the pots that we were going to use to cook everything in, but before that could happen one of the ladies put it on the ground and a pig stuck his head in it looking for a meal. Needless to say I took it upon myself to clean the inside of that pot, and its worth mentioning that the outside was covered in ash, like you picked it up and ash came off on you where ever you touched it. This is because most kitchens in Nicaragua are wood burning outdoor kitchens, so the pots get covered with ash every time you use them. So after all the prep work, we relinquished cooking to the ladies of the community and went to set up things for the charla in the church.

This is the table where we cooked, Don Antonio, and the plates of finished food!

This is the interior of the church where we did charlas in the morning and the afternoon. We had about 15-20 young people for the morning session and 40-45 adults for the afternoon!

All of the charlas we did this day were done with the understanding that soon, the water system that we have been working on in Miguel Cristiano will be finished! So our hope was to educate people about how their water system works, how to maintain it, and how important water is to their health as a community. It was an awesome program that has been most of what my friend Zach who has been living here since last May has been working on developing. We had pretty good attendance and really a lot of interest which was awesome! We broke in the middle of the day for lunch and despite my concerns, we had plenty of food for everyone and didn't run out. It felt like a feeding the 5,000 moment and it was a sure sign that God was with us that day.

Since that was one of my better stories, although I have a few others, I will try to remain brief to summarize my involvement in the other projects here that Amigos has been doing and how my own research has sort of come alongside those projects.
 

I have been going out with our nurses here Annie and Conchita to work on the Embarazadas project. This is a 7 charla series of lessons for the intention of teaching women in the communities What to expect when they are expecting, essentially. They were finding that there were many people who knew nothing about what to expect when they were pregnant and were actually terrified when it came time to deliver. There has been varying interest in this project in the different communities, some people are very interested, others are not, and they have been struggling to understand the difference in involvement in the different communities. That is where my research comes in. I am in the process of designing a survey with the intention of understanding these trends and receiving information in such a way that is much less biased. The Nicaraguans are notorious for telling you the answers they think you would like to hear when you are asking them a question about something, especially if you are white.

I have also been talking to people on the staff and friends of people down here about various health topics, I have been learning things about stuff they have seen and advice they have been given by people and some of the Nicaraguan staffs stories about their experiences with health. I have heard some very interesting stories! I am working on refining the questions I want to ask of some of my friends in the communities where the health team has been working so I can start to explore some more topics further.

Sorry about the long post! But I am honored if you have stuck it out this far! I love, miss and am praying for everyone at home and can't wait to see you all in June!