This week was another big trip, this time to a town called El Obraje in the department La Pimienta. This town was quite a bit further than El Roblar-- closer to 3.5 hours in the car-- but more easily accessible; we pulled the car right up to the clinic, no hiking necessary!
Our first big activity were the health stations that we did on Tuesday morning and stretching into the afternoon. Our partner takes statistics like the height, weight, and hemoglobin levels of children under five and other at-risk individuals and compares them from year to year. Sarah and I were put on the anemia-checking station, which means that we collectively pricked 74 children and tested their blood for hemoglobin in portable machines. Jessica, the staff member we've been working the most closely with, told us that we should explain to the mothers that anemia is not an incredibly serious disease to make sure they didn't become overly upset; our partner tries to treat it mostly with changes in diet, though vitamins are sometimes available.
We spent most of the week supervising water filters as we did in El Roblar. Though we had many more to do in El Obraje (over 70 as opposed to 22), the task went much faster as the terrain was quite flat which made it easy to walk around.
On Tuesday night, we processed some of the water samples we had taken earlier in the day. We had some "PetriFilms," a kind of mobile petri dish and agar which allowed us to grow the bacteria in the field and see how effective the filters actually were. As in El Roblar, we had mixed results with some families drinking completely clean water and others drinking water more contaminated than their original well. While these results were obviously disappointing, it gave us a good idea of how to direct the community meeting on Thursday afternoon.
The meeting, or asamblea, wasn't quite what I was expecting. The staff and the health committee took equal parts in leading the meeting. The health promoter himself was pretty shy, but Jessica felt that some information would have a greater impact if it came from him. Additionally, he's the one who will follow up on progress-- cleanliness of water filters, for example, or weighing children found to be malnourished-- after we leave, so the community needed to see that he was capable in this regard.
The community seemed most interested in the results from the anemia test, which is perhaps not surprising since it was certainly the most dramatic. The team and the health community worked hard to present all of the data in an interesting manner, however, from posters of nourishing foods to skits of how to care for the water filters, so hopefully the community members were able to take away most of the information.
Since this was the longest time we'd spent in a community, we got to try some interesting new foods, and especially new beverages. One of the most memorable is called avena. It's made from oats, specifically oatmeal, dissolved in water with a great deal of sugar. There's so much sugar that you can't really taste the oatmeal, but it's still not something I'd like to drink every day. Nicaraguans, however, are just as perplexed by North American-style oatmeal (cooked with sugar, berries, etc). It's a funny little culture clash I wasn't quite expecting.
And today at breakfast back in Managua, a couple of the staff cut down some fresh mangoes and shared with us. They were juicy and sweet, but the men had inexplicably piled salt on them. Sarah and I tried a couple of bites, but wound up wiping most of the salt off when no one was looking.
Sorry for the super long post, but I had a lot to catch you all up on! We're also going away for the weekend, so expect a new post on Monday or Tuesday. I'll be around next week, however, so maybe you'll get some more regular messages after that.
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