Report

This past summer I was an intern for Save the Children USA in Chinandega, Nicaragua. Chinandega is one of the hottest, most humid places on earth. For me, the heat was simply part of the foreign beauty around me – part and parcel with the lush greenery, garbage in the streets, inquisitive children, cheap taxi rides, chaos in the market, and delicious fried plantains.

Living in Nicaragua was a joyful experience. A vital part of that joy was the social and cultural world I fell into. I met beautiful people who made a permanent impact on me: A strong woman in the campo who wielded a machete like it was an extension of her body, cut me fresh sugarcane, and sent me home with a jumbo, ripe papaya from her tree. A young girl, maybe 6 years old, with a gleaming mind, who spent an hour showing me the family’s fields and animals and remembered my name two months later when I returned. A woman from work opened her home to me, letting me come and go as I pleased. Two interns from other schools constantly made me smile and made the inevitable loneliness a little less lonely.

My scope of work was to help evaluate the USAID Title II Food Security Program run by Save the Children in Nicaragua. Integral to that program are rural centers for mothers and young children. The centers educate about proper health and nutrition, provide food rations and focus on early childhood stimulation (working motor skills, language, and cognition). My job was to look at test scores of children who attended the centers and compare them to test scores of kids who did not attend the centers. The hypothesis was that children who attended the centers would demonstrate higher scores.

The process was hard. There were those difficulties that required a deep breath and a positive attitude to overcome. Trying to get transportation out to the campo to verify data was one of them. There were only three vehicles available in an office of more than 30 people. In addition, there was no real system for reserving a vehicle or setting up the week’s schedule. I had to be persistent in asking for transportation and resourceful in trying to carpool to common destinations. And then there were the real challenges – above all deciding how to approach the data analysis and figure out how to present the findings in a clear, logical way. I could hear my brain creaking and groaning as it stretched, accommodating new concepts and making sense of them.

I loved all of the challenges that came my way. I appreciated how they made me grow and learn. It was those challenges and the process of overcoming them that made the experience as rich as it was.

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