¡Las Primeras Reuniones!

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The first meetings! Success comes in many different sizes, and in the last few weeks they have ranged anywhere from getting used to a spanish keyboard to actually holding my classes and having participants! There is, however, good news and bad news for this week. The good news. I have now successfully held two of my meetings and people actually showed up! First, I just want to say that Midwives are amazing people and invaluable resources in their communities. I have so much respect for anyone who takes on that responsibility, especially in a semi-rural, developing place, and the extent to which they know everyone in their community is incredible. My first two meetings took place in La Competencia, a neighborhood in Jinotepe, and all we had to do to spread the word was tell the midwife who lives there what we were doing and by this week he had a list of interested people. No, not everyone on the lists came, but we had 10 adolescents yesterday, ages 10-16 with one 7-year-old, and 4 pregnant women today! As a start, this is bastante para mí (enough for me)!

There is a clear lack of knowledge in the group of adolescents about sex ed, which is not helped by the fact that these topics are still somewhat taboo here, so there will definitely be a lot to teach them. They were very shy the first day, Im sure partly because there was a gringa in the room, but they actually seemed interested in being there. A very good sign. From what I have heard, there isnt a group like this here, or at least I havent found it yet, so I hope this one will continue and will be able to grow. I have to give a lot of credit to a young Psychologist named Tatiana who works at the health center; she has tons of energy and a passion for teaching adolescents about topics such as these, and this class is already a hundred times better with her help. (The fact that she is a native spanish speaker also doesnt hurt!) Hopefully a great person to continue the classes after I leave!

The bummer of the week is that my computer crashed. I am in the process of figuring out how to get it fixed, but we will see. I was also not the smartest person ever and didnt have my documents saved online or anywhere, so I lost all the work I had done since Ive been here. Not to worry, I do have a backup of my computer at school, but I had to start from scratch for my materials for my classes. You also may have noticed the lack of apostrophes in this blog, that would be due to my inability to find one on this spanish keyboard (I dont believe they actually use them in spanish).

So, this week has been quite the whirlwind of catching up, but just being able to actually hold the first meetings of my classes and see that there is some interest in them has been rewarding! I have one more meeting tomorrow, also a pregnancy class just in a different location. Im looking forward to meeting more wonderful women and to begin talking about nutrition (a very big issue here) and the importance of attending all of their doctor appointments!

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Photos

León + volcanos
The triangle volcano on the right is Volcán Momotombo. Classic cone volcano