I am horrible at blogging. I am horrible at keeping a journal consistently. There is my oh-so-obvious confession of the day. But I am good at getting settled in to life here in Nicaragua and all that I have experienced here has been incredible.
So my sincerest of apologies for not keeping my blog updated. I know this means that anyone who had motivation before to read it probably won't for my lack of dedication to it, but it will be here none the less for all of those who care to take a glance once again.
I am currently back in Managua (getting ready for Christmas already!) in my permanent home now in a neighborhood called the Centroamerica. It's a really nice neighborhood with lots of little "fritangas" or food stands that sell lots of tasty, greasy Nicaraguan food. The neighborhood is calm and is in a great location with a grocery store within walking distance and is only about a 10 minute taxi drive from my office. I have two great house mates, a woman from California and her boyfriend who is Nicaraguan. I am very blessed to have settled in so quickly to my living situation and to truly feel at home.
So where did I disappear to for a month and a half? (Or more like two and a half months...) If you didn't know I finally got the go ahead to head out to one of AMC's field projects in a very remote area of Nicaragua (basically without internet access) for 6 weeks on the Caribbean or Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in a "city" called Waspam. I was in Waspam from the very beginning of October to the middle of November. Waspam has a population of about 6,000 people that is located in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) of Niaragua on the Coco River, which forms the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. Accion Medica Cristiana has an office in Waspam and works in more than 30 communities that live along the Rio Coco. Development work in this region is extremely challenging. To reach the communities along the Rio Coco, you must travel by boat (either a small motor boat which is called a panga or is a dug-out wooden boat called a batho) and the cost of gasoline for the motors is very high and thus restrictive. For just one trip along the River Coco from Waspam and back costs hundreds of dollars (U.S.). Also, AMC is privileged to have an amazing staff who are almost all originally from the region and speak Miskito as well as Spanish. Most of the people in this region are Miskito, an indigenous people that have populated this region for centuries. Besides the overwhelming financial costs of working in the RAAN, the cultural and language differences have kept many development agencies from working in this region as well.
In my first two days in Waspam I was sent on a trip on the lower part of the Coco River to a town not many get to visit called Cabo Viejo, which is at the mouth of the river that flows out to the Caribbean Sea, right near Cabo Gracias a Dios where Christopher Columbus landed in 1502 on the Caribbean coast. The trip was about 6 hours in a boat and then at least a half an hour out into the Caribbean Sea and then into the lagoon Cabo Viejo is on. I traveled there with 4 employees of AMC (all men so asking to go to the bathroom was interesting and showering was out of the question) to distribute mosquito nets, soap, and buckets to the people living there. We also gave a talk about the use of clorine to purify the water they are drinking to prevent waterborne illnesses, especially in children. After Hurricane Felix, the Coco River was contaminated and the area around Cabo Viejo flooded. Many animals were drowned and many fish died, both things that are a staple part of the diet for people here. When we visited Cabo Viejo, there was still standing water in places, causing problems with mosquitoes and making it impossible for people to plant their crops. All this is a reality of the people of this region that is so susceptible to flooding and natural disasters. (There have been 14 natural disasters in the region in the last 17 years.)
When I returned to Waspam, COVERED in miserable bug bites from a little insect called "la coloradilla", I was put to work in the administrative part of the AMC office with Beda and Olga. They are in charge of managing the finance reports and generally running the office. I ended up becoming friends with both of them and had a lot of fun working with them despite the sometimes boring and tedious nature of their work. Many of the financial reports AMC had to complete after the hurricane from some of the "normal projects" they were working on before the emergency were put on hold as everyone had been focusing on the distribution of aid more than record keeping. Some of my limited computer skills have really come in handy here but I've also learned a lot from Beda and Olga about the kind of accounting that is essential to keep this office and organization running.
I actually did spend the most amount of time in Waspam in the office of AMC. That wasn't what I had originally wanted to do, but life in Nicaragua requires flexibility. The extremely tedious, frustrating and yet I suppose necessary at times, nature of paperwork related to the world of bureaucracies of NGO's was revealed to me first-hand. And I won't bore you with all the details of what the paperwork was about but I will say that the challenge of it all definitely brought me closer to the entire AMC team of Waspam. It was an amazing feeling as a volunteer to feel like a real member of the team in such a short period of time. But it happened because I worked side by side with them, day and night, weekdays and weeknights....crunching numbers in Excel and cursing decimal points until I couldn't express all my frustration in either Spanish or English!
My favorite moments occurred in my other two visits to communities on the Rio Coco, however. My second trip on the river took me on the upper part to a town called San Jeronimo to do a food distribution. Our batho was loaded with rice, beans, flour, sugar, salt, oatmeal, buckets for carrying water, among other things. With a population of over 1000, it took us two and a half days to distribute all of the products. It is a very tiring process as each product must be measured out according to how many people are in each community and someone from each family has to be physically present to sign for the products they receive (this is part of that frustrating bureaucratic paperwork). But not everyone from the family can read or write and not everyone from the family comes to the place where the products are being distributed. The most frustrating thing about the process was seeing the desperation that poverty causes: in every community where AMC was distributing food, there were always a handful of families who had lied on the census the leaders had given AMC to use saying they had more people in their family than they did so that they could receive more food. It was painful to see this but it is also a reminder of the awful poverty these families live in. If your family is so often at the point of starving, why not stretch the truth so that they can eat better for a few days? My favorite part in San Jeronimo though was playing with and taking pictures of the children there. The kids were fascinated by my camera and I loved hearing their giggles as they got instant gratification from seeing themselves on the camera screen!
Finally, I visited another community in the lower part of the Coco River called Andris. We completed a distribution of cooking oil and then began a process called the IAP (or a rough translation in English would be the Participatory Investigative Action process), which is basically community organizing at its best! It is exactly what I wanted to be doing so I was thrilled to be able to just start it with some of the Waspam AMC team. The goal of the process is to accompany communities in a process of learning about their own problems, prioritize them, and then empower the community to look for solutions to those problems with resources they already have. Since my visit to Andris was at the very end of my time in Waspam, leaving part of the AMC team there to continue the work without me was hard. I really didn't want to leave in the end.There are many more things I could tell you about this portion of my journey ( i.e. more than two weeks of extremely sporadic electricity when the AMC team is straining to meet deadlines, what I observed/experienced in the communities on the river, my wonderful birthday party and goodbye celebration!), but I will resist for now. Hopefully when I get my act together, I'll be writing some article or story to become a little testimony for AMC and that I may send off the mission's office for the UMC. More updates to come...sooner than later I promise!
Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season full of peace and joy.
No comments:
Post a Comment