Make your move.

I was looking for answers the other night, and started going through my bible. I have been thinking a lot lately about why I am here in Nicaragua this time, about how it happened, how I heard the call and followed it. I am wondering what it is that has me back here this time, what I am meant to learn and experience while I am here. I found some notes I had made at a bible study nearly two years ago, which I remember applied so much to my life back then, and still does now. I thought I would share some of my thoughts from that! 

We all want our lives to matter, we want for God to use us to our full potential. But we don’t always get a clear message from God, and if we sit around waiting for a clear message, we can miss out on opportunities and adventures that may come up in the meantime.

 God doesn’t always talk to us like he did with Moses very clearly and blatantly obvious with a burning bush. We are always facing decisions in our lives and what we need to do is make our move.

 The steps to making our move are as follows : Step 1- Identify a need (don’t over think it or over complicate it, the move is clear), Step 2 – Listen to what God has already said (he has been talking to us for thousands of years in the scripture, especially Exodus 20:3 You must have no other God before me, John 13:34-35 Love each other, Romans 8:31 If God is for us, who can ever be against us?, 2 Timothy 1:7 God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love and self-discipline), Step 3: Embrace the risk and move into what God is doing.

The short of the answer is, I don’t know and may never be told clearly why I was called here (That is for Him to know and me to find out on that whole need-to-know basis sort of thing). But during this experience, God will be talking to me, He will be guiding me on my path. This is part of my story, part of my future and my journey.

Hillsong United's Like an Avalanche

Verse 1
Beautiful God
Laying Your majesty aside
You reached out in love to show me life
Lifted from darkness into light
Oh
Verse 2
King for a slave
Trading Your righteousness for shame
Despite all my pride and foolish ways
Caught in Your infinite embrace
Oh
Chorus 1
And I find myself here on my knees again
Caught up in grace like an avalanche
Nothing compares to this love love love
Burning in my heart
[Verse 3:]
Saviour and Friend
Breathing Your life into my heart
Your word is the lamp unto my path
Forever I'm humbled by Your love
Oh
Bridge
Take my life
Take all that I am
With all that I am I will love You
Take my heart
Take all that I have
Jesus how I adore You
Chorus 2
And I find myself here on my knees again
Caught up in grace like an avalanche
Nothing compare to this love love love

 

One Sight! A Day in the Clinic

I have finally gotten some time to de-brief and sum up the experiences I had during our OneSight experience. We had an awesome week and we treated 2,579 patients and helped them all to see better. Every patient we saw got an eye check and a pair of sunglasses. We bused patients in from the communities where we work for their particular days and times they had appointments. After we bused them in we had them go to our registration tables, visual acuity testing, dilation, auto-refraction and a control table then on to see the doctors. The photos that follow should help paint the picture of the patient experience!

One of our three buses that we used to bring people in from the rural communities where we work to the clinic.

Where we had people wait outside until it was their turn to come in and through the process.

The awesome group we got to work in partnership with for the whole week.

Registration tables where the patient's information and basic medical background were collected.

 Somehow I have no pictures from visual acuity, but for anyone who has ever had an eye exam it was basically just looking at the E charts to see what everyone was able to see with or without the glasses they may have already had.

 These are some pictures from the dilation stations, we had some awesome nurses from Mount Carmel Nursing school with us who helped out a ton during the week!

Dilation station! This was a fun station to be at for awhile and I spent some time here translating and asking people if they were pregnant because it was important to know that before giving them the drops (so naturally to break the ice a little I asked everyone, young, old, male and female if they could be pregnant, it was too funny!)

 These pictures are from auto-refraction! It was very cool that they could take pictures of a person's eye and get a reasonable estimate (in most cases) of their prescription. I learned how to use this machine during the week and that was pretty cool!

After auto-refraction, the patients went to a control table where all their information was added into their computer system and if they had glasses already those were read for their prescription.

This is an idea of how the doctor's tables looked set up in the assembly room where we were holding the clinic, there were 8 tables where we performed eye exams and looked for the correct prescriptions for everyone who we treated.

My friend Tomas and I with our sweet friend Eufrosina who was a total crack up. She had a really high prescription and it was obvious that she really hadn't been able to see for a long time. When we tried on the different lenses her reaction to each different option was just hysterical, she would start laughing hysterically and put them on and take them off and laugh every time they were on. This was one of my favorite memories of translating. I spent a lot of my time translating at the Doctor's tables, acting as the pathway through which the doctors and patients could really communicate and perform the exam.

This is John, Amigos for Christ's director sitting at one of the tables as a translator

Jack is one of our awesome staff people who was also on hand to translate during the week which was awesome

One of the doctors performing an eye check on some sweet kids of one of our employees on our last day of clinicals

After they left the doctor's tables, the patients went to the distribution table where awesome people like Thomas here helped them to fit their glasses to their face and got them outfitted with a pair of sunglasses.

 Everyone was so excited to model their new sunglasses, and these are a few of my favorite pictures from the week.

The man on the top left looked like a rockstar and that smile said it all!

The two ladies on the top right were mother and daughter and had matching sunglasses which they didn't realize until they saw eachother and then they proceeded to just crack up when they found out they had been independently fitted with the same ones!

 The lady on the bottom left was there with her grandsons who felt so cool in their new sunglasses.

The man on the bottom right is our Jefe (boss) Luis and his son Luisito after his eye check with his new cute sunglasses.





We had a great week here with One Sight, thanks to all of the awesome volunteers they brought with them! It was an awesome partnership experience and I can only hope that Amigos will be able to do this again in the future with One Sight!

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!

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!