Archive for the ‘Anna’ Category
July 16, 2009
After a safe landing, a heat sensor check for swine flu, and the scavenger hunt for all of our luggage, Lauren and I were greeted by Douglas at the airport in Managua!! We traveled from the bustling city, through the varios neighborhoods, commercial areas, and arrived at Suni Solar just in time to eat papusas for dinner. The constant noise of the city brought back memories—children playing in the street until all hours of the night, cars honking, regatone music coming from all different directions, and the sound of mangos falling from the trees onto the corregated roof of the sisters house. It’s great to be back. Where else can you have mango pie for breakfast?
The quick bounce into Managua was followed the next morning with the fantastic four hour bus ride to Sabana Grande, Totogalpa. Along carreterra norte, the full streets of Managua quickly fall to the pace of the country. I’ve found that I remember Nicaragua but a lot of the smells across the country, the heat of Managua, the smell of burning trash in the country, smell of fried food, and the hot rain that comes consistently every single day.
It is amazing to revisit Sabana Grande another time. The Solar Center is located not directly on the Pan American highway, but relatively close. Its location en route from Managua to Ocotal is recognized by the majority of the bus drivers. Slowly but surely, the Solar Center and las Mujeres Solares are becoming a place of interest for many people, local and entranjeros (from outside of Nicaragua). The current focus of las Mujeres Solares is establishing a Solar Restaurant in the same area as the Solar Center. This will give the the women an opportunity to share their culinary skills and knowledge of solar cooking and renewable energy with others. The Solar Center, supported by las Mujeres Solares, the Solar Center staff and the network of volunteers and student researchers, is becoming a model community of the empowerment of renewable energy and entrepreneurship in a rural community.
The constant development of las Mujeres Solares is incredible. The SEED Award has allowed them to move forward with legalized status. In the near future, they will officially be established as a cooperative in Nicaragua! This particular form of organization aligns with many of the social norms of las Mujeres Solares and will balance their desire to become a sustainable business, with the social standard of working collectively to achieve their goals in unison.
It’s energizing to see the momentum and potential of las Mujeres Solares. Just as exciting was talking with the current Grupo Fenix volunteers who are supporting this work in Totogalpa and Managua. While all of the staff have different experiences and roles, and perspectives on the future of all of the organizations involved, they share the common desire to support and guide the work of the Solar Center. Sustainable development of a community requires somewhat of an exit strategy for the extranjeros involved. The current Grupo Fenix employees supporting Susan in her work have such a fantastic outlook on development work. I have been constantly impressed by the current Grupo Fenix employees, Cody, David, and Bruno who are managing the work; they are great partners for Salud del Sol, Inc. to be working alongside.
Cherling, is adorable, it’s amazing how much she has grown in one year! While Maria Antonia was working in the Solar Center for the afternoon, she came with and mosied through the garden, sat pensively among the staff, and waited quite patiently while her grandma was cleaning the garden. She also asked me if I knew who Hannah Montana was—ha. Marvin and Masiel were not at the house for the most part, which was sad because I loved spending time with them, but they both staying with their families. One night after dinner, I was able to help Maria Antonia write back to a past UD student who had stayed with her at the beginning of May. While I looking for paper and a pen to use, Maria Antonia explained that she never had the chance to learn to read and write in school because there was always so much work to do around her family’s farm. It was only after she had her own family that she was able to teach herself to read and write. After she finished writing the note, she had me read the note for clarification– to make sure the UD volunteer would understand the message. It was a rewarding experience to be able to support Maria’s continued communication with other UD volunteers, and made me admire her entrpreneurial drive for learning.
It was incredible to see that along side of all of the changes that are happening within the community, there is still the same feel of the people– their dedication to improving the lives of their family members and their drive to learn about the world.
July 4, 2009
Happy 4th of July!
I am so excited to be enroute to Nicaragua on this Saturday aftenoon. I had a wave of nostalgia while packing all of my rain gear, keens, bringing the travel backpack out. Reading the blogs of the UD students who are currently in Nicaragua has been inspiring and motivating, I’m excited to head back!
I keep thinking about that quote “You never step in the same river twice”—I think it might actually be from Pocahontas—I’m willing to admit my attachment to Disney films 
I know that I am returning to the same community and will be greeted by many familiar faces, which is so comforting. However, as much as I am looking forward to seeing the familiar faces and be back in the community, I am equally as excited to experience many of the changes that are taking place! The final allocation of the SEED Award is being used to establish Las Mujeres Solares as a cooperative—which is an incredible step towards the business development! Not to mention, I can’t even imagine how much Cherling, the darling grandaughter of Maria Antonia who I lived with last summer, must have grown in one year!
Another exciting development for this trip is Lauren Dokes, Salud del Sol, Inc. Director of Finance, will be traveling with me to Nicaragua! This will be Lauren’s first trip to Nicaragua and I think it will be an incredible experience for her and the rest of our team.
It will be a packed week, full of catching up with the women of Las Mujeres Solares, the field team of Salud del Sol, Inc., and the leadership team of Grupo Fenix. We have also been able to set up meetings with people and organizations that we met last summer, such as the energetic Rotary Club of Ocotal, the Jubilee House Community of Ciudad Sandino, and hopefully we will have the chance to meet with the students from the UNI that are researching a model of the solar autoclave in Managua.
In addition to work with Salud del Sol, Inc., I also will be working with a project through the Innovations in International Health Program of MIT. The Inter American Development Bank is funding a project to teach innovative biomedical training kits to doctors within the CIES School of Public Health in Managua. For the past few weeks, Jose Gomez and Lisa Schlecht have been developing training kits including a variety of technologies to bring to Nicaragua. The goal of the kits is to demystify various medical technologies such as microfluidics, diagnotistics testing and nebulizers to encourage doctors to adapt their equipment to their own needs or to repair equipment on their own. It’s quite an exciting project and I’m excited to be a part of it!
Thanks for reading, and check back often for updates and thoughts from Nicaragua!
-Anna
April 20, 2009
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to represent Salud del Sol at International Development Night at MIT Museum (ID Night), a precursor to the International Development Conference held at Harvard Kennedy School. ID Night was an opportunity for different organizations from the MIT and Harvard community to showcase their projects of International Development, Salud del Sol was partnered with Innovations in International Health. Conference participants, students and community members stopped by our poster to learn about the solar autoclave research, business model of Salud del Sol and Las Mujeres Solares, and to offer their insight. It was energizing to hear the interest of others, and also to bring their suggestions back to the Salud del Sol team for further thought.
I also had a chance to talk with a few of the other organizations at the event, including Amy Quin, from One Earth Designs, an innovative organization focused on developing culturally appropriate sources of alternative energy. At the International Development night, Amy was presenting a parabolic cooker being developed for villages in western China.
March 24, 2009
The past week, I had the opportunity to attend classes and speakers for an innovative course at MIT, D-Lab Health, taught by professor Jose Gomez-Marquez, who is also the program director of the Innovations for International Health (IIH) initiative. The multi-disciplinary course focuses on understanding global health challenges and designing medical technologies for these challenges through the lenses of engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, and economics.
The D-Lab Health class is very similar to the ETHOS course offered at UD, so it has been enlightening to see how a different University teaches students about the philosophy of appropriate technology in developing countries. My personal interest in global health and work with Salud del Sol make this class a perfect opportunity to learn from other students and professionals in the field and coincidentally, the D-Lab Health class is working with partner organizations in Nicaragua!
I spoke with Jose and his co-worker from IIH, Amit Srivastava about the scope of the field of global health. There are many pieces to issues of global health, including the large scale burden of the lack of infrastructure, the brain drain of medical professionals from developing countries to the US, poor training for community health workers, and the lack of appropriate diagnostic equipment. D-Lab Health educates students on the larger picture of challenges in global health, and then applies this knowledge to the research and design of innovative solutions to address these challenges.
During the classes that I was able to attend last week, the students were learning about complex medical devices, such as ultrasound machines and optometry instruments. The students were tasked with evaluating how these product designs could be altered to be more appropriate for use in developing countries, by asking questions about the parameters of the product design such as the cost of replaceable pieces and the training is required to use the devices.
Another class with D-Lab Health involved a trip to the Operating Room of Shriner’s Children’s Hospital, to experience the conditions of an operating room in a developed country. This trip at the OR gave a point of reference to compare the resource deprived healthcare settings of developing countries.
This week, the D-Lab Health students are traveling to Nicaragua to observe healthcare workers and patients in a field assessment of the challenges in health care equipment and delivery that these professionals face on a daily basis. The students will be bringing these challenges back to the D-Lab for the remaining part of the semester to develop a medical technology kit to address some of the underlying issues that the discover within the clinics. They will be traveling to different locations around the country, including Ocotal! Over the weekend, I was able to talk with the students and Jose about my experience living in Nicaragua last summer, everything from practical financial and travel advice to not leaving the country with out trying ron con pasas ice cream from the Eskimo man and having a cup of coffee from locals. Essential for truly experiencing the culture!
D-Lab Health branches from the over arching D-Lab course of MIT, which uses engineering design principals to improve the lives of the bottom billion in developing countries. Along with attending the D-Lab Health courses last week, I was also able to participate in a product design review for the D-Lab class. It was a brainstorming session for students working on a range of products, including a chlorine dispenser, a cell phone enabled baby scle, a portable hydro powered lantern, an energy storage solution for communities in Tibet,a strong maker to recycle plastic bags, and an interlocking stabilized soil block maker.
February 12, 2009
Hunger and malnutrition are both major causes of illness and major obstacles to effective treatment of many diseases. Malnutrition weakens immune systems, and greatly increases the likelihood of falling ill with and dying from many common infectious diseases.
During the Physicians for Human Rights Conference, Donna Barry of Partners In Health presented on the topic of Food and Health Safety and how this applies to the health and economic development of developing countries. She explained how Partners In Health is addressing this crisis of malnourished children and families through their work in Haiti, where they are providing food supplements and lunches to the children in the community. While current food programs are providing meals for those in need, the majority of the time the foods provided lack the general nutrition required by malnourished people. Not all food aid delivered to developing countries is good. For example, Haiti has become a food dependent country, where 92% pf the families are in food security programs. The staple to this program is a simple peanut butter like supplement called Nourimil. Now I cannot imagine how appealing it would be to eat peanut butter every meal of the day, however by providing children in Haiti with Nourimil,people in the community have experience dramatic health improvements. While it is a more expensive option, people in Haiti are spending less time in the hospital, which in the long run is saving money for the local health system.
Another benefit of Nourmil, is that it is locally produced. PIH has partnered with local agricultural farms to create a vertical supply chain to produce the Nourimil peanut butter product. In this way, they are providing jobs for local people and stimulating the economy. This is an important aspect of development programs, the ability to work with the local community while addressing crucial issues of health and economic development. Below is a summary of this collaborative project of PIH.
Community-Based Treatment of Severely Malnourished Children
According to UNICEF, almost a quarter of Haiti’s children suffer from chronic malnutrition, as evidenced by their stunted growth. Our nutrition program meets the immediate needs of severely malnourished children through a nutrition treatment which uses two products called Nourimamba and Nourimil – both produced through our Zanmi Agrikol program – given to children identified in our clinics and by our accompagnateurs, or community health workers. In cooperation with Zanmi Agrikol, PIH and ZL treated nearly 3,464 malnourished children in 2007 across Central Haiti and the Artibonite District, and created opportunities for agricultural training and production for over 100 Haitian farmers and families. We are also providing meals to over 9,000 children daily through our school lunch program. Read more
February 3, 2009
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to learn about issues in international healthcare, network with med students and other healthcare professionals at the Physicians for Human Rights Conference at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) CEO, Frank Donaghue, described the conference as a way of learning from other students and professionals dedicated to the availability of healthcare for all who need it and how to move from “rhetoric to reality” through the collective effort of the conference participants.
Key note speakers at the event included, Stephen Lewis, Co-Director of AIDS-Free World and former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and Julio Frenk, current dean of Harvard School of Public Health and former Minister of Health for Mexico. Stephen Lewis set the tone for the conference with his speech addressing the over arching issues that are contributing to the healthcare violations in developing countries. Lewis talked about U2 singer Bono, who asked why is it possible for the US and other nations to find $700 billion in 3 months to help bail out Wall St. but not $250 million over 3 years for the agreed upon Millenium Development Goals from the 2000 UN Summit.
Julio Frenk spoke about the ethical framework in which he used to guide the development and implementation of a national health insurance reform during his tenure as Minister of Health in Mexico. Frenk strongly stated that health is a second generation human right, meaning it transcends citizenship. This implies that it is unethical to limits healthcare services for immigrants in the United States.
Along with the keynote speakers, there were sessions that developed skills in advocacy and also sessions that covered topics in the cross section of human rights and health, custody, and conflict. Out of the 40 sessions available, conference participants only had the opportunity to attend 4 different sessions. Tough decision! I tried to vary the topics of the sessions I was attending. The following are brief summaries of the different sessions I attended, Read more
January 20, 2009
Greetings from Boston, MA on this historic Tuesday morning. The excitement from Washington, D.C. is contagious. While I watched the inaguaration ceremony and speeches from a local restaurant, I couldn’t help but feel inspired by the next leader of our country. The clanking of silverware and plates came to a halt as Barack stepped up to the podium, and the restaurant patrons errupted in applause as Obama was appointmented as the 44th President of the United States of America. How great was it to hear,
“We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.”
I’m excited to see what this new Presidency brings; and what support will be available to continue our work of using technology to raise the quality of healthcare in developing countries and perhaps even across the US!
On the Salud del Sol front, I will be attending a conference in Providence, RI on January 31 – February 1. The Health and Human Rights in 2009 conference is sponsored by Physicians For Human Rights, a collective organization of healthcare students and professionals with a passion for promoting the right to health. Along with pursuing health care has a human right, PHR also investigates human rights abuses across the world and works to stop them. The conference offers various sessions for developing advocacy skills and presenting significant healthcare and human rights issues across the globe. Sounds like a fit for the mission of Salud del Sol! Not to mention an incredible opportunity to talk with other students and healthcare professionals working in the international arena. If you have any insight to this conference or know someone attending, I would love to hear from you!
September 1, 2008
Incredible cultural immersion experience in Nicaragua. Check.
Learn to make Nacatamales with host family. Check.
Improve Spanish. Check.
Learn to carry a bucket of water on head. half Check.
With hands. Check.
Non profit status for Salud del Sol. Pending…
After an amazing experience in Nicaragua, I am well on my way to the “next steps” in life and what that entails, including more development for Salud del Sol! I learned more this summer than I ever thought possible, about the people, culture, development work, eco-engineering, and how to practice sustainable business development. The time spent in Nicaragua was a juxtapose between the slow paced life style of the relaxed culture and knowing that time was limited and trying to create as many successful projects as possible. The last few weeks of the trip I traveled with fellow Salud del Sol member Lori Hanna and my sister Kelsey to various meetings with NGOs and other potential partners for Salud del Sol.
Exciting development with the product research came from a meeting held with Susan Kinne, Director of Grupo Fenix, Dr. Richard Komp, creator of the autoclave project, Chemical Engineering students from the National Engineering University and their professor, Lori and myself. We spent a Friday morning brainstorming about how to continue the product research of the autoclave in Nicaragua. Salud del Sol has a focus on the importance of appropriate technology with of product research. That being said, it is incredibly relevant that we are able to collaboratively conduct research with teams in Nicaragua. As a result of this meeting held, we have set up to continue communication with a research team of chemical engineers who will be testing one of the current autoclave designs and making adaptations to another for further research. Look for more information about these developments within the project section of the website!
Read more
July 29, 2008
I can’t remember the last time I was more excited to see a mini bus than last Wednesday when the Solar Culture Course participants (including Kelsey!) arrived at the Solar Center. It is such a dynamic group of participants, from a ten year old brainiac to college professors, a physiological scientist to the founder of a Honduran NGO for orphans. All are eager to learn about the culture of Sabana Grande, and the immense progress of renewable energy projects in the community. The energy of this group has brought a great dynamic to Sabana Grande. I can’t count the number of times I have heard people say “se parace” (literally, you both seem the same) since Kelsey has arrived. The sibling resemblance has not changed since I left the US two months ago! Cherling and Masiel love having another older sister at the house and I really enjoy having someone here to share this experience. This morning we took a family trip to the well to teach Kelsey how to carry a water bucket. Maybe this will be an opportunity for me to pass off my well developed talent of bucket carrying to a rookie!
As exciting as it was to have the course arrive, this also meant that Dan Hensel and Matt Wills would leaving for the US. It’s incredible to think about the experience that we have all had together, autoclave testing, daily Spanish classes, new pet pigs and distributing candy to all of the neighborhood kids. It was wonderful to be working with both of them this summer and I look forward to keeping in touch this fall.
With the Solar Culture Course has come a change of seasons for Sabana Grande, called Veranito or “Little Summer.” There is a 4 week period beginning the middle of July and lasting until the middle of August in which the constant rain is halted and the days are filled with sun. After 9 weeks of clouds and rain, this is perfect news for autoclave testing. Lori, Dan, and Pete had a wonderful day of testing last Wednesday morning with temperatures reaching 150 degrees Celsius. Hopefully more to come over the next two weeks.
The days at the Solar Center never cease to amaze me. Just as we were getting back to work after lunch, there was a man walking his bike up the gravel path in front of the Solar Center. Curious, a group of us waited out front to talk. Ten seconds into the conversation, this man was sold as an inspiration to us all.
Oscar Cañon from Columbia
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July 27, 2008
Anna has been in Nicaragua since May. Here is a sampling of who she has been working and playing with. Click on an image for a larger view.
