Health Care for 10,000 Nicaraguan Campesinos

In November, our Healthcare Project suffered a major tragedy: our beloved local director, who had managed the project since its inception sixteen years ago, died of COVID.

At the end of November, the Director and Executive Director of Nicaragua Projekt traveled to Ocotal to explore ways for our project to continue operating.

We are very happy to report that our project will continue operating with a new local Director. She is the younger sister of our former Director and is deeply committed to carrying on her older sister’s life work. She is energetic and quite competent.

Our medical team now consists of our doctor, our nurse, and our fourteen local healthcare providers, called brigadistas.

During our visit to Ocotal, our brigadistas came to Ocotal for a quarterly continuing education meeting. This was the first quarterly meeting since COVID struck in March 2020. Our brigadistas are all fully vaccinated. Even so, during the meeting, we all wore masks. These meetings are important to improve our brigadistas healthcare skills and also to maintain our sense of working as a team.

During our two-week visit to the project, we traveled with the mobile clinic to all eleven communities we serve. We visited each brigadista’s home and consultation space and resupplied their mini-pharmacies. Almost all of our brigadistas have been working with us since they completed their training in spring 2017. They continue to grow in experience and expertise.

Despite our loss, our healthcare project is vigorous and strong.  

Corona is getting worse
For the last year we often hear of people who fall ill or may be did not survive "atypical pneumonia", but now the situation is getting worse. More and more people dy of Corona. Everybody knows someone how passed away, killed by COVID-19. More in the City (Ocotal) than in the country side where our communities are located. People are reluctant to visit the city.... We changed our brigadista training to a 1 to 1 training in the villages, no big meetings in Ocotal. We continue our health chats, explaining how to follow simple hygiene standards and supply masks.
Vaccination campaigns run by the government have now started. You can see long queues of patients waiting to get the injection.

But they are also some good news. A final year medical student joined our team. We are happy to get some help and to be on the same time able to teach, show what we are doing and to establish a relation with the medical university.
Katrin Hennings

Sent from my Android phone with GMX Mail. Please excuse my brevity.