Sweating it Out...Week by Week

Money.  Money.  Money.  

 *sigh*

Kathy is our bookkeeper.  She enters all the in-coming and out-going funds for the CDCA on the accounting system in English and again in Spanish.  She provides us with weekly financial summaries so we can talk about what we are to do that week and next month.

Since the civil unrest of 2018, the CDCA’s finances have been stretched to their limit*.  Where we see it weekly, Kathy sees it daily.

Kathy wakes up in the morning and with her Book of Common Prayer, she has her daily worship time.  During that time and at night, one of the requests she makes in her prayers is that the CDCA will get the funds we need to operate. 

Kathy is 70 years old and the stress of worrying about how we are going to meet our bills and pay rolls is wearing.  When any of the rest of us have filled in for Kathy when she has been gone, we slowly go crazy seeing all the money just go out and out for need after need. 

She has done remarkably well for the last 25 years. 

Recently, Diana Ibarra began working in the office aiding Kathy; she  has helped tremendously.  Cheerful Diana taking over so many tasks has freed Kathy up to do the books in a timely fashion.  Diana also sees the money go out the door for needs but does not feel the immense responsibility to make sure there is actually money there for the needs.

None of us like to fund-raise.  We all hate searching for funding, constantly asking people for donations, coming up with new ways to get people to give, etc., but we do what we can with what we have and wait for our weekly meetings to see how well people responded.  Thank God, for me, it is only once a week!

-Kathleen

*If you can help with ongoing costs of the clinic, or for other needs, that would be wonderful!   You can give here: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/jhc-cdca

Feeling like a Miserable Cow

Amazing things will happen today if you choose not to be a miserable cow is my wallpaper on my computer.  I am frequently these days a “miserable cow.”  I suffer from depression and it seems to be getting the best of me.  I don’t cry…no, I just cannot do what I need to do.

As in the United States, many of the street people here in Nicaragua need serious mental care.  Mental health issues seem to be the last societal issues to be dealt with; probably because it costs money and is on-going.  

Earlier this month a local TV station, Channel 4, brought volunteer medical professionals to the Nueva Vida Clinic on a Saturday to provide free care. Among the varied doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and dentists there was a psychiatrist. Hopefully mental health is becoming identified nationwide as critical.

When Pat died,* I laid awake thinking how were we going to address the many and varied mental health issues that present themselves in the poor of Nueva Vida.  Stress increases heart disease and diabetes.  Depression increases the desire to just die.  Grief can overwhelm a father and cause a family to go hungry.  Trauma can trigger crippling anxiety.  And the children…

Pat was wonderful with children…her play therapy helped so many kids talk about abuse, trauma, grief, and fear.  Much of her work went into learning disabilities in children and helping families and schools cope with their over-active children and helping the children learn how to learn.

God, the Universe, Fate…what have you…provided Dr. Acuna, who volunteers at our clinic three mornings a week.  She works with our patients to help them cope.  She is loved by the patients and she gives her time freely – at least for now.  We hope to find sponsors for her,** so that her need for an income can be met and she can continue working with us.

Feeling overwhelmed…feeling unable to care for your loved ones…feeling panicky…or just like a miserable cow…is crippling.  Poverty holds millions in a state of trauma, grief, fear, and hopelessness…having a trained listening ear is invaluable.

-Kathleen

*Pat Floerke, our loved community member and counselor at the clinic, died suddenly on December the 18, 2018 after a fall - probably due to a severe stroke - and severed her carotid artery and jugular vein.
**If you can help with ongoing costs of the clinic, that would be wonderful! You can give here: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/jhc-cdca

Jumping in at the Deep End: 20 Years of Nueva Vida Health Clinic

We have not been posting blogs for a while now.  We are trying once again.  Please let us know if you find them helpful.

The Center for Development in Central America’s health Clinic in Nueva Vida has now been open for 20 years!!! 

WOW!  And for those 20 years, I have been the Director…me, with a master’s of divinity degree.  How?

There are many people to praise or blame for this.  One such person is Nora Laws.  Nora  and her wife Becky (a physician's assistant and pediatrician, respectively) have been long-time supporters of our work…donating their time as well coming down to hold health clinics in remote areas of Nicaragua.  They are also dear, dear friends. 

After Hurricane Mitch in 1998, Nora called and said that she was ready to come in two weeks with trunks of medicines to see victims of the hurricane, if we wanted her…duh!  Yeah!  She had one condition:  she wanted me, a mother of three young boys, to be her pharmacist…thus, I began working with medicines.

Another major player was Dr. Don Stechschulte, the doctor from Bucknell University who came with that first Bucknell delegation also right after Hurricane Mitch.  As he saw 100 patients a day in a throw-together “church” (actually a room with a dirt floor and scrap metal walls), he depended on me to know what medicines we had and what the desperately poor patients had as resources.*  When he and the Bucknell folks started raising funds and awareness for the clinic, they asked me to run it.

Then there is Mike, my beloved, who attended a meeting of NGOs working with the hurricane victims and discovered that the one clinic running in the area was about to be abandoned.  Mike came home on a Thursday and told me the clinic was the CDCA’s on Monday if I wanted to run it.  And thus, I became the Director.

For me, a divinity student, this is the way The Divine works…using many to shove some of us into the roles we need to fulfill.  I had no medical knowledge, but so, so many doctors, nurses, public health professionals taught me.  I still have few organizational skills, but now we have Josefa Rayo as administrator, who has more organizational skills in her little finger nail than I do in my whole being.

The Nueva Vida Clinic has served tens of thousands of patients and grown and adapted….and thanks to Nora, Don, and Mike…I’ve been fortunate to be a part of it.
-Kathleen

If you want to support the clinic…$20 for the 20th anniversary would help greatly and as Mike says, “the more zeros you have and can add to that $20, the better!" 😊

*For example, the poor cannot buy yogurt or applesauce for gastritis, but might be able to round up some papaya.

9 Months of Loving Care: One Mother To Another

In the 7 years since we began our New Mother’s Program at the Nueva Vida Clinic, we have cared for  more than 800 pregnant women and ushered their healthy babies into the world!

This year we hope to do the same for 120 more moms…but we need your help; with Nicaragua in crisis we’re facing a limited budget. Our regular volunteer delegations have cancelled due the U.S. State Department travel warning for Nicaragua resulting from political unrest last year. Without delegations, the donations and medicines they bring, our clinic is struggling to maintain our services.

The New Mothers group is one of our most effective programs...new moms learn danger signs during pregnancy which has saved moms and babies in our program. They also support one another and grow as new moms together...

You can help a new mother make it safely through her pregnancy to the birth of her healthy baby…

This Mother's Day, Give a gift in honor of your mother to support mothers in Nicaragua: One Mother to Another!

Sponsor a pregnant woman in honor of your mother!

$225 pays for 9 months of loving care:

• • Doctor visits
• • Laboratory tests
• • Medicines
• • Prenatal vitamins
• • Monthly classes in pregnancy, breastfeeding and infant care
• • Home visits from our health promoters
• • Regular glucose and blood pressure tests

 

 

Make sure this year’s pregnant women and babies receive the same excellent care by donating $225 in honor of your mother to cover the cost of another mother’s prenatal care.

 

Donate online* (designate it Mother’s Day)  and send your name, your mother’s name and her email to: becca@jhc-cdca.org.   

We will send your mother a beautiful e-card telling her of this gift in her  honor.

* https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/jhc-cdca

All donations are tax deductible in the U.S.

Thank you! 

 

What Keeps You Awake At Night?

“Come inside, I’ll show you,” says the woman, beckoning us into her yard. She takes my arm and pulls me past the two pigs snuffling slops, past the old woman and young girl sorting through trash and over to the kitchen: a wood stove made out of a wheel rim and a fan cage under a partial roof of rusty metal sheeting. Next to the stove she points to her outhouse. 

“This is our latrine. Ten of us use it, and it’s full. There’s nowhere to dig another one,” she gestures to the tiny yard between the rooms of the house and the outside wall of their squatter’s shack on the edge of Nueva Vida.” I ask if I can take pictures, she says sure, as long as I don’t mind the smell. I pull back the plastic door and snap a few shots, but it’s impossible to get perspective on just how close the outhouse is to the kitchen where food is prepared, impossible to convey the stench through the lens.

We ask her the next question on our form, “Would your community be safer with street lighting?”

“Of course,” she answers, turning and showing me her front gate. “Look, we’ve had to reinforce our gate with steel so that my family doesn’t get hit by stray bullets when the gangs fight in the street. We need to make our community safer.” 


I was out with our Clinic’s health promoters and public health graduate students from East Tennessee State University taking survey on the quality of life in Nueva Vida. In past years, our work with ETSU has been surveying the community on topics such as birth control, diabetes and mosquito-borne illnesses. 

This year, we broadened the topic beyond strictly medical issues because we felt a need to look at the community’s health in a broader sense. At the Clinic, we’ve seen that it’s possible to improve people’s health to a point, but then patients reach a plateau that is impossible to move beyond using only medical solutions. The poverty in which our patients live means that other factors contribute to their poor health – safety, well-being and larger community factors. Therefore, we chose to ask them collectively: “What keeps you awake at night? What is your biggest worry for you and your family?”

To facilitate those conversations, our network of lay health promoters organized block meetings in their homes where small groups discussed the issues most affecting their families. Students then ranked the topics residents were most passionate or most concerned about and created a survey which we took door-to-door in the course of a week.

Nineteen years ago we held a similar series of community meetings in the newly-formed barrio of Nueva Vida shortly after Hurricane Mitch, and in those meetings, access to basic health care and jobs were at the top of the list of concerns.

In the meetings we just held, those two topics didn’t even make the list of top five concerns. Instead, the topics closest to people’s hearts were gray water (used wash water that runs through the dirt streets), lack of a sewage system, unpaved roads, and street lights.

Nueva Vida 1999

As I sat listening in those meetings, I was surprised at the marked change. I wasn’t there in those first meetings, but I was in Nueva Vida around that time, and the desperation there was palpable. This time around, the conversation was fundamentally different.

In 19 years, not only has Nueva Vida changed, but Nicaragua has changed fundamentally: poverty levels are now under 25%, down from 42% in 2009 and formal employment grew by 10.8% just last year.

Why is health care no longer a top concern? Not only do the people of Nueva Vida count on the basic and specialized services of our Health Clinic, but they have a government health post in the barrio, an actual hospital in nearby in Ciudad Sandino, and on a national scale, the Nicaraguan people can count on a series of new and expanded hospitals around the country. 

Walking around the barrio, I see so many changes that my heart soars with hope: people have houses, the trees we planted so long ago have been growing for nearly twenty years. And yet…

“I’ll be honest with you,” says one woman, standing outside her house where garbage trucks race through gray water mud puddles, headed to the dump around the corner. “There are 15 of us in my house, and we don’t have an outhouse. We just go across the road to the empty lot and go in the bushes. There’s too many of us, we don’t have space to dig a latrine. We need a toilet, we need a sewage connection to get rid of this gray water. We need this road paved for all the garbage trucks throwing up dust and mud.”

The results of the survey were that gray water and sewage were top priority at 62%, lighting/safety came in next at 26% and housing at 11%. Outhouses are most common in Nueva Vida, 59% of houses have one and 5 people use it on average.


If we are dedicated to the holistic health of a community in Nueva Vida, then it looks like we have our work cut out for us. - Becca