Getting Started

My time in Nicaragua has been flying by! I started work immediately upon arrival. The Nicaraguans work like crazy. It is not unusual to find people hard at work on Sat. morning. This however, does not mean that they do not have a social life for it is also not unusual to find bars and discos packed on a Wednesday or Thursday night-kareoke is very popular here! But back to work...
The project I am working on can only be described as community-based and participatory in every sense of the word. The organizations is taking a fresh approach to designing and implementing a program. Instead of the usual top down approach (which has never been very popular in Nicaragua) they are working directly with the communities to design and implement programs to combat the population of the mosquitos that transmit dengue. There are teams/brigadas that consist of volunteers who have been going from house to house in selected barrios/neighborhoods to educate the households about the danger of dengue and how they can prevent the mosquitos from breeding in their houses and break the cycle of life of the mosquito. The brigadas have been working for 2 years now and have developed a sense of responsibility a and pride in their neighborhoods which you can really see when they talk abou their barrios.
My specific project is to work with the communities to develop something called an "ovitrampa" which will serve as a tool to measure changes in population of mosquitos. It is a small jar with some sort of substrate (a tongue depressor for now) in which the mosquitos will come and lay their eggs. Every 4 days the 'ovitrampa' will be examined and the tongue depressors will be compared to one another to determine if the number of eggs has decreased, stayed the same or increased and action will be taken from there.
Like I said I started work as soon as I got here. I first went to each of the 10 interventions barrios. There are 30 barrios involved in the study, 10 are intervention and 20 are control. Until last week I was convinced there were only 30 barrios in Managua because each of the 10 seemed so large and spread out-I just learned there are 130 barrios in Managua. It blows my mind how big and spread out this city is.