Vamos a buscar un “ride”

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, but I’m finally close to getting my IRB approval. The IRB process has been especially hard because I’m working with children under the age of fourteen. Communication has also been fairly difficult because I’m in Nicaragua, but I’m finally about to get approval. The hardest aspect has been trying to get CITI training for my project personnel. CITI training is the human research ethics training that is required for project personnel working on projects that needs IRB approval. After I had spent more than a week trying to find a human research ethics training in Spanish for my project personnel, the IRB decided that I do not need it anymore since my project personnel will only be translating. Hopefully I’ll get the approval soon!

Just learning some salsa in the community. Kids start learning when they're.less than 10 years old!

While waiting for my approval, I’ve gone out into the communities and started telling the community members about my project. I’ll be working with four “sub-communities” within Nandaime. These include Santa Fe, Manchon, Santa Ana and Casa de Piedra. Most of the communities are easily accessible in a bus except Santa Ana. Every time I go with a community member to the school in Santa Ana, they always say we’ll catch a ride. Even in Spanish, they would “vamos a buscar un ‘ride’.” The only thing is nobody usually drives during the time of day I go. So I usually end up walking 12 kilometers accompanied with a community member at the hottest time of the day.Brutal.At least it hasn’t rained either of the times I went to the community.

Tejadas, Huevos, y Gallo Pinto

My goal of going to these communities at this point is to spread the word about my project and arrange meeting time for the parents to come sign the permission form, if they want their children to participate in the study. Permission is needed before I conduct individual interviews with the children about their dental hygiene. The only thing is most of these community members have never had any experience with people trying to “protect their wellbeing and rights”. Usually when any local organization does studies, they just go directly to the children and pull them out at recess and ask them questions. The concept of receiving permission is foreign to these parents who when the announcement was made about the study that there will be a meeting to receive their permissions, they were so confused. Whenever they get together for these “reunions”, they usually get together for “charlas”. These charlas or talks are the most efficient way of disseminating information in these communities. Since most of the women are stay-at-home mothers, they come to a central meeting place like the clinic for a “charla”. These charlas at the clinic range from health talks about sexual hygiene to eating healthy. So when they were told about the study and that there would be a reunion in the future to get their permission if they wanted their children to participate, they were all expecting charlas. Nobody understood that it wasn’t a charla because they had never heard of anything else! I’ve repeated my project several times, so hopefully they had understood the goal of my project. But we’ll see.

Daniel Ortega, current president of Nicaragua

El Principio De La Expedición

Nicaragua has been quoted by The U.S Department of State as the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The communities I'll be working in are rural communities and in these communities, rarely does one even possess the bare necessities. The little makeshift shacks that these Nicaraguenses occupy rarely consists of more than one communal room with no furniture. Nicaragua's staple diet consists of beans and rice (gallo pinto for breakfast, arroz con frijoles for lunch and frigoles con arroz for dinner), but in these communities, people can't even afford beans because of its recent rising costs. This results in anemia for most children even if they are overweight. I've yet to cope with the poverty I've seen here or anywhere. At times justified as caused by their "laziness", most people, especially the women, wake up at dawn and work until night washing clothes manually, cooking food, and selling food in the streets and still, only earn barely enough to sustain. Seldom will you find a better example of injustice than this.


For my project, I'm still working on receiving IRB approval. In the mean time, I've been venturing to communities and meeting the professors in the school and directors of the organizations I'm working with. I met a student working with the Children's Wellness Fund. To describe him as a helper would be an understatement. He would be better described as a sherpa encountered on an expedition to the top of K2. In some ways, he did seem like a guide and helped me through a 12 kilometer trek to the school in another community named Santa Fe. But he also introducted me to schools in Santa Ana and Manchon where I was able to meet the directors and professors and arrange a time to present my research study to the community members. Now that I have surveyed the community, let's see if I can sucessfully reach the summit.