UPOLI Community Health Assessments

Today, we met the local families who we will be completing health assessments on. We formed four groups of two and were paired with one UPOLI student. Esther, Eliette, Conys, and Joseling are all second-year nursing students. They help facilitate communication between us and our families. The four families we are working with are very diverse and present with different health challenges. Some families are multigenerational, with children as young as two and adults as old as sixty-three. Their homes have various levels of luxury, including electricity and running water. Liz and Kevin dove head first into the culture by sharing a traditional Nicaraguan coffee beverage with their family.

After being introduced to our families, we spent the afternoon working with our UPOLI partners to develop a comprehensive list of health assessment questions to help us capture and understand our family’s needs. Our families have access to a local community clinic, Centro Academico Anexo Villa Libertad or “CAESC”, where health and vaccination fairs are hosted, and where doctors are available every Tuesday for women to receive pap screenings. CAESC has a few young volunteers from the community who travel throughout the “barrio” community members. In addition, they check in on the families and ensure those in need of assistance receive the proper health resources. They traveled with us to our family’s homes to help us establish trust and comfort with our presence in the community. In the afternoon, we traveled to a nearby mall, to buy supplies for a health fair that we will be hosting next week for the community. We are sharing lots of laughs and enjoying getting to know our Nicaraguan nursing colleagues. Since not all of us speak Spanish and our UPOLI counterparts do not speak English, we have discovered alternative ways to communicate with one another. We finished off the day with an amazing dinner at a local Nicaraguan restaurant (a favorite of our driver, Don Julio).

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