I am officially two-thirds done with my internship here in Nicaragua, and I can hardly believe it. Looking forward and realizing I only have a few weeks I have left is off-putting because it feels as if I have just started and have so much left that I want to learn and do. However, at the same time, looking back at all of the rich experiences I have had thus far makes me feel as if I have been here much, much longer than six mere weeks.

My schedule here has definitely gotten busier over the past six weeks, and I love it. Once I started my girls’ leadership club in the secondary school and pregnant teenager support group in a local health post, I have always had something to do. Outside of actually leading the sessions, I am often running around town to gather supplies from stores and various houses around the neighborhood that sell homemade refreshments like plantain chips and natural juices. I also dedicate some time out of each day to plan my upcoming sessions by creating educational games, making PowerPoints, informational brochures, evaluation sheets, and more. Sometimes I schedule meetings with health center employees to discuss logistics, and when I have a relatively free half-day, I go into the health center to shadow physicians and nurses in clinic and in surrounding rural health posts. Every Friday, I attend an educational workshop held by Foundations for Sustainable Development, the third-party organization that connected me with my organization. These workshops have covered a wide range of topics ranging from domestic violence, the economy, and the health care system in Nicaragua.

I am very happy with the progress of my projects and all that I am learning from my work. My thirty-three students in the girls’ leadership club called Chicas Poderosas that I started up at a local secondary school in Monimbó never fail to impress me more and more each session. We just finished our fourth after-school session, and thus concluded our first unit on environmental health. This unit started off with me presenting a couple of workshops on health effects of the environment and the girls discussing ways to make change in the way their fellow community members approached treating the environment. After discussion of the challenges they have observed their community face, the girls collectively decided to pursue a community outreach project involving educating the primary school students at their school on the topics they had just covered. They subsequently collaborated in six small groups to develop lesson plans and campaign posters to present to the students. Originally unbeknownst to me, a couple of the groups even brought their posters home to decorate them further with their peers! Watching the groups confidently present half-hour lessons about the public health effects of littering, the dangers of plastic, and how to prevent Chikungya, dengue, and Zika to around twenty primary school students each gave me the proudest feeling. The girls did a wonderful job at engaging the students- going off-script and trying to get them to participate- to the extent that already dismissed primary school students came back inside the classroom to watch!

I am also pleased with the progress of the pregnant adolescent support group that I helped organize in a local urban health post. From the evaluation sheets and the girls’ consistent participation in the sessions’ discussions, I think that they are benefitting from the workshops. At my last session, the women were furiously taking notes on each slide, which made me happy that they were actually interested and invested in learning more about the topic of following a healthy diet and physical activity plan during pregnancy. Beyond their interest in helping themselves, it was also apparent that they were interested in taking what they have learned and sharing it with others to make a difference in their communities. During the last session, the girls and the supervising doctor had long conversations about observations of problems they identified in their community such as seeing pregnant women mount horses and motorcycles and consume alcohol and greasy soups sold in the streets. The doctor and I both emphasized that they could help change what they saw, by spreading what they have learned and addressing myths to the benefit of their community’s health and safety.

While content with the current progression of my projects in respect to the value that the participants are extracting from each session, I still worried about the sustainability of my projects. The health center employees are extremely busy seeing patients and have limited time to take on extra projects. Furthermore, financial strains are all too real and relevant. With the pregnant adolescent support group, I think I have found health workers who have become invested in the success of the project and who might be willing to continue it in the future; however, I am still looking for someone to help lead the girls’ club in the secondary school when I leave. The health center director keeps on pushing back the date of when she plans to send someone with me, and I am getting worried. To balance this with a bit of good news, I was awarded a grant from Foundations for Sustainable Development yesterday after a trying application process! I now have $616 to dedicate to making sure that these programs will last beyond the duration of my internship.

Outside of my project work, I am thrilled with my current level of integration into the community. I have gotten very close to my host family and often have long chats with the grandmother and mother, who have worked with Foundations for Sustainable Development for the last fifteen years. They have provided me a wonderful amount of social and emotional support that has helped me adapt to life here more easily. Before coming here, I set myself a goal of attending at least five community events outside of work events, and I have accomplished this with the help of social networking through my host family. I have attended church mass, birthday parties, Father’s Day and Mother’s Day celebrations, and city-wide religious parades. My goal of befriending more than five of my neighbors here was also accomplished. Because socialization and community involvement are huge parts of my host mother’s life, people are in and out my house all of the time. In general, people in Masaya are quite friendly and open, and it is easy to strike up conversation with anyone. I even have managed to make friends with people who live in the houses along the path that I take to the health center. I am also extremely happy that my Spanish has improved exponentially. I have picked up on a great deal of Nicaraguan slang and am able to interact smoothly with locals. I am actually now able to absorb background conversations and television shows without intentionally concentrating my attention on them, which, for me, signifies a huge leap in my comprehension skills.

I am also extremely grateful for the opportunities I have had to travel outside of my town to visit marvelous lagoons, volcanoes, hot springs, and beaches. Nicaragua’s natural beauty is breathtaking. My family (my father, mother, and sister) are arriving tonight for a week’s stay, and I am excited to show them around and share a slice of my experiences here with them.

Besides these overwhelmingly positive experiences, I am also appreciative for all of the challenges I have confronted and overcome. In the past six weeks, I have unfortunately been sick quite frequently, experiencing strep throat, horrible nausea, diarrhea, and heat syncope. It was when I was in the middle of waiting out a horrible two-day long fever or a horrible bout of vomiting that I felt the most alone and vulnerable. There have been a couple of times on this trip when I felt like my body was being attacked by everything Nicaraguan. During these times I couldn’t even stand leaving my house to walk down the street because of the feeling that the dust from the street – mixed with horse and dog waste, human trash, and polluted urban runoff- was contaminating my eyes, nose and throat. I couldn’t bear to go to the bathroom and pee because of my fear of the inevitable attack of the bathroom mosquitoes on my exposed butt cheeks. I couldn’t sleep right because of the terrible city noise at night and the horribly loud cohetes (celebratory air horn) early in the morning. These times of illness were definitely the most trying parts of my trip, but I am glad that I experienced them because now I feel much more strong and independent.

With the challenges I have confronted and overcome so far and the progress I have made on the goals I have made before this trip, I am happy with where I am and excited for where I am going.