1 year in site and Med brigade

August 5, 2012

I’ve officially been in site for 1 year!  August 1^st was my move in date last year after swearing in as a Peace Corps volunteer at the end of July 2011.  Time has seemingly flown by, yet I also feel like I’ve been through a lot this past year.  I’ve lived with a Nicaraguan host family for 6 months, then moved out into my own house.  I’ve taught various things in my community from English classes to building improved ovens.  I’ve traveled as far north as Somoto canyon near the border of Honduras and as far south as Ometepe Island near the border to Costa Rica.  And I’ve been to both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts.    I’ve had various visitors from the States come to see this beautiful country with me, and I’ve seen different parts of this beautiful country with various volunteers who live here like me.  Now I have one more full year to keep working and doing what I’ve come here to do: grow and learn and hopefully teach something of value to those who requested it.  It feels like I haven’t really done much in my community, and now I’m feeling the pressure of having only a year left to do it. 

This past week I spent with a medical brigade that came to Jinotega to provide their free services to the community.  They had contacted a local health organization stating the need for translators (interpreters, to be correct), and so they in turn contacted a Peace Corps health volunteer who lives in Jinotega to see if she could gather some of us for the brigade.  So I decided to give it a try.  I showed up on the first day with the plan of only staying for 3 days, but I was learning so much and got so involved that I ended up staying the entire 8 days of the brigade!  The brigade is called IMA Helps (check out their website http://www.internationalmedicalalliance.org/ ), and was started by a woman who works in the Palm Desert area of California, so most of the doctors and surgeons who volunteered their time are from that area or elsewhere in southern California.  Over 90 medical volunteers came for this brigade to Jinotega!  It was huge, and they attended to thousands of locals who came seeking medical help.  There were various surgeons, including plastics, orthopedic, and general.  There were various doctors and nurses seeing patients and giving medication for things that didn’t require surgery.  The first day I was set up with a doctor in triage, interpreting for the patients that came to him.  It was very nerve-wracking for me because I was the sole link between what the patient was saying and what the doctor was prescribing.  It’s a huge responsibility, but after a few days I became more confident with my medical Spanish and the types of ailments the patients were complaining about. 

The second day I was asked to help organize the line in the surgical consult area.  That was a boring and sad job, because people had to sit and wait for hours and hours to sometimes be told what they had couldn’t be operated on, or that the surgery schedule was already full for the entire brigade and they wouldn’t be seen at all.  The surgeons were also doing surgeries all day and so wouldn’t come out to do consults for hours at a time.  I felt really bad being the person to tell them they just had to wait some more and I’m sorry that they might miss their bus home if they decided to wait it out.  But hey, it’s free surgery!  If they’re not willing to wait then they won’t get their chance at all to talk to a surgeon. 

Me at the dental extraction clinic 

The third day I helped in the dental area, with the trailer that was doing tooth extractions.  After the first couple patients I wasn’t sure I could handle watching all the needles in the gums and the yanking of all the bloody molars, but I quickly got over it and stayed the whole day.  Towards the end I was leaning over the patients interested in watching what the dentist was doing.  The following days I helped out between the triage area with the doctors and nurses and the vital signs area where the brigade initially decided which area to send each patient.  It was super interesting, even if it became somewhat repetitive (almost every person complained of “gastritis”, acid reflux, headaches, general body aches, knee and back pain, and the occasional chest pain).  Unfortunately sometimes the only thing the nurses and doctors could do was give them a bag of Ibuprofen or Tylenol to help with their general body pain and describe how they should lift with their legs and not their back.  On the other hand, most of the surgeries they do change lives.  Many cleft palates and lips were repaired, many people received prosthetic limbs that allowed them to walk for the first time in their lives, and others received treatment for medical issues that they otherwise couldn’t have due to the inability to afford a hospital visit.  I did get to scrub in to watch a couple surgeries.  I never would have thought I could have had the opportunity to see something like that, so I jumped at the chance.  I watched a thyroid the size of an apricot be removed, and then later a hernia surgery.  It was crazy to be allowed to stand so close and watch the surgery up close and personal.  And I didn’t faint! 

Me and Alicia getting ready to go watch a surgery

The people that worked for this brigade were extremely generous with their time and money to come to Nicaragua for a third time.  They pay their own way to get here and take vacation time from their jobs to help these communities in need.  I felt very welcomed and appreciated during my time with IMA Helps, and would love to help them again in the future.  If anyone is interested and able to donate money to IMA for future brigades, please do so knowing that the money goes to a wonderful cause! 

This next week I’m headed to the city of Chinandega to teach the workshop about improved ovens for a group of Health and Environment volunteers and their community counterparts.  I’ve made an instruction manual to hand out and have presentation to give before actually building an oven with half of them.  The other half is going to learn how to build a stove with another volunteer that has lots of experience with stoves.  I hope it goes well and that people learn something! 

Until next time. . .

~Sarita~