Nicaragua

Hello from Nicaragua! I’ve completed nearly two weeks of my four-week internship here in a retreat center near the city of Mateare. It’s been really tricky to get to internet cafes since we’re several miles from town and it’s not the safest to travel around here as foreigners, and then once there the electricity isn’t guaranteed….

We are in class all day Monday – Thursday then on Friday and Saturday go to villages for practical experience and to get to know the communities. Last week I went to the department (they’re not states or provinces here, but “departments”) of Boaco and stayed overnight with a family in a small village. I bought a lovely woven purse there – the women with the CHE program have started working with an NGO which teaches them weaving and embroidery alongside spiritual lessons. Once the quality improves to international standards the NGO, “The Master’s Workshop,” will help them to find a market.

This coming weekend I will be part of a team helping with a “school screening.” We will be checking heights and weights on 100 children in an inner city community in Managua and comparing that data to global averages to assess for chronic malnutrition (I printed the WHO charts before coming). The kids have already given blood and stool samples to check for anemia and parasites. There are six of us assigned to this team and we’re hoping to tally the results on Friday and present them to the parents on Saturday. We’ll give the results individually to the parents and then ask them as a group what they would like to do help improve their children’s health.

The group I’m with is super-fun! We are:

• Jacob and Raquel, a Mexican couple who love to teach us games (usually after supper)
• Three of my co-workers from Argentina, trying to survive without fruit after lunch or coffee after supper
• Daniel and Zoila, a Venezuelan couple and their young daughter who are used to traveling with their own hammocks when they visit villages
• Flor, Dalkis, and Hiram, three Dominicans who have taught us that among Spanish-speaking countries words can have very different meanings (the word for “milestone” or “mile marker” in Spanish only means a specific shape of, um, feces in the Dominican Republic, for example!)
• Adolfo, a Honduran who is an agronomist by training and knows a lot about growing coffee
• Mandy, an American woman who’s spending this year living in Mexico and learning about CHE. I’ve really enjoyed talking with her about cultural things and life as an ex-pat.