More from San Ramón

On our last day in San Ramón, Cassandra who is the current health volunteer there gave us a quick tour around town. The primary highlight was her favorite panaderia, where I took the opportunity to get a few photos. Anna is the blonde in the green shirt in the pictures above, it was her 23^rd birthday that day. In the photo with me is Sarah McDaniel, she was my roomie back in DC. Another photo is all of us taking a break at the panaderia, while Cassie talks about her day to day life and work responsibilities as a Peace Corps volunteer.

The next stop was the World Vision office, which in the photo above has a guard sitting out front. It was a quite average looking place from the outside. I can’t wait until my friend Heather sees this. She is working for World Vision in Angola, Africa right now. She also keeps a GREAT blog about her interesting life and often posts about Public Health. You can reach her blog from this page by clicking on the link, A Minha Vida, under “Blogs I follow” in the right hand column.

And the breathtaking beauty against the turquoise backdrop is Natalie.

La Dalia and the Lookout Tower

Today we all went to a community about an hour and a half away called La Dalia. We gave charlas about nutrition during pregnancy and risk factors during pregnancy to a group of seven pregnant women. For most of the women, this pregnancy is their first child. The youngest pregnant woman was fifteen years old. The rest were in their early to mid twenties. We asked a few of the girls if they had names picked out yet for their babies and only one or two had thought of a name. Apparently most Nicaraguan babies are not named until well after they are born. This casa materna was really nice with its own garden and nice meeting room. There is a picture above of the garden and of a really nice mural there as well.

After the charlas, we had lunch a little place nearby. I had grilled chicken, beans, rice, cabbage salad, and a fried plantain. Delicious! We noticed that a man sitting at the table next to us didn’t finish all the food on his plate. So he gestured to a kid outside on the street to come in, sit down, and finish his food. Our hearts melted and we followed suit. When we put another plate in front of the little boy, he gestured to two more kids to come inside. Those three children inhaled the food. We haven’t encountered many hungry children yet in our training. Though it is something we may see often in service. Some towns here in Nicaragua have places called Comedores Infantiles, where children can go have a free meal if their family is unable to provide one.

After lunch, we toured La Dalia’s brand spanking new hospital. It was indeed beautiful and not quite fully moved into yet. I think the highlight of the tour were the newborns. We met a baby that was literally born yesterday J. However, it is important to note that there was NO soap in ANY bathroom.

Then it was a long, rocky, winding car ride back to San Ramon. My roommates and I took a quick descansito and then hiked up to the lookout tower on the hill above our hotel. The picture above looks down over the town of San Ramon.

We found out tonight that instead of staying here in San Ramon for another night, we are going to Esteli to meet up with the rest of our MCH group. All of us are looking forward to this because the word on the street is that the hotel there has hot water. Keep your fingers crossed!

Trentino

We are spending this week in San Ramon, Matalgalpa for Practicum Week, which means spending time in a casa materna, meeting and talking with some brigadistas, as well as current volunteers in our sector.

On Monday, we left our training towns early in the morning to get a bus to Managua. However, there was a microbus strike due to high gas prices and therefore it took us way longer to get there because there were so few buses running. Finally, we arrived in Managua and received our first visit to the Peace Corps office! It’s really nice and is air conditioned. There is also a fabulous volunteer book exchange and library. I’ve already checked out 2 books. One of them is a Salmon Rushdie book about Nicaragua in the 80s. After receiving a few technical charlas from MINSA staff at the office, we left for San Ramon.

We are staying at a darling little hotel that has beautiful misty mountain views and free wireless. This town is the site of a health volunteer named Cassie. On our first day, she took us to meet one of her most active brigadistas who lives way out in a rural community called Trentino. Eduardo drove us there in the 4-wheel drive official Peace Corps truck. The road was insanely terrible and we had to cross two creeks.

We met with Doña Maria on her farm for a couple hours. She discussed her duties as a brigadista, which included providing health info to her community, acting as a liaison and contact person for her community for health related issues, and performing an annual census of her community for the government just to name a few. She’s also a midwife and her mother was a midwife too. She has given birth to 14 children! However, now advocates family planning to all adolescents in her community.

After our talk, she gave us a tour of her farm! There were a ton of chickens and lots of baby chicks. There were also a couple of noisy roosters that kept interrupting our health chat. There was a crazy looking hybrid duck with darling little yellow ducklings. Then she took us to her fruit tree field, which she informed us would be full of fruit during the month of august. There were orange, papaya, mango, sweet lemon, lemon, banana, and avocado trees. Doesn’t that sound heavenly? There happened to be a few lemons on one tree, so she took it upon herself to beat down a few and hand them out to us. Never have a smelled a lemon so rich in lemon flavor. Later that evening we squeezed them over our dinner.

Instead of hitching a ride back to San Ramon with Eduardo, we decided to hike back which took about an hour. We took a couple of shortcuts, one was through a pasture that had grass ten feet tall on either side of the trail, and another was up a river bed, where we intersected a man traveling on horseback. Living out in a rural community like Trentino, a horse would be great transportation.

The hike was beautiful with lots of expansive vistas of mountains and pastures and super green trees and bright orange flowers. I also encountered lots of trees with Spanish moss and was reminded of home! The tree in the picture above is covered in Spanish moss. So beautiful!

After lunch that afternoon, my group presented a charla on hygiene to the local casa materna which currently has only one pregnant woman staying there. However, last week there were seven pregnant women staying there, but six gave birth in one week. Ha! We are scheduled to give more charlas there tomorrow, but instead we are traveling to another community called La Dalia instead.