Nicaragua: First Impressions

The Nicaragua Winter Term is a partnership with Outreach International(OI) to visit their site in Nicaragua.  Unlike many "mission trips" that people go on, the goal of this trip is to learn, not to fix.  Students got to meet with OI staff members in Independence yesterday to get a very brief picture of what OI does and how they do it.  We learned that they use a process called Participatory Human Development(PHD) to help people help themselves.  The idea behind the process is that the people need to have an active role in their own development as a community for it to be a sustainable change.  You are not helping people in the most effective way if you go into an area, tell them what to do (or do it for them), and leave.  The change needs to come from within the community itself.  Now we are off to Nicaragua to get a tiny peek at this process in action.  There are three groups of students: Track 1 is students making this trip for the first time; Track 2 is students making this trip for the second time or with previous experience to prepare them for a more in depth look at poverty and the PDH process; Track 3 is a student and chaperone who have been on this trip more than two times.

After an early morning and a couple of planes, we arrived in Managua early this afternoon.  We dropped Track 3 off at a bus station to begin their journey into Nicaraguan culture, and will see very little of them.  Tracks 1 and 2 then got our first look at Nicaragua in the city of Masaya.  We took a brief look at the market and went to a city park, and got to experience being a minority group, a new experience for many of us.  Even in the few hours we were in the city and meeting together, people are already being pushed to the edge of their comfort zone, preparing us to learn, experience, and have our eyes opened.  Tomorrow we have more training and orientation on poverty and the work of Alcance Nicaragua, the organization here that works with OI to help communities.  No one knows quite what to expect, even the few of us who have been here before, so we are keeping an open mind and trying to be prepared for the experience of a lifetime.

Anna Cleland-Leighton