Blog 2: Meeting Our Collaborators

PROMPT: Your thoughts about our Nicaraguan collaborators and the class visit with Michael Boudreau of Compas de Nicaragua. Consider some organizations that work in Nicaragua, such as Bridges to Community, Compas de Nicaragua, and the Fabretto Foundation, as well as other relevant service-learning organizations.

Getting to Skype with our Nicaraguan collaborators from Bridges to Community and students from the URACAAN, as well as getting to meet Michael Boudreau in person, were invaluable experiences. First of all, talking with them definitely made the whole experience seem real. We would actually get to meet Hugo and Eva and some of the students we talked to, they have lived and experienced many of the things that we’ve only heard and learned about, and just knowing that was so cool. I think we all also benefitted from hearing them talk about their work and getting to ask them questions about our individual projects and Nicaragua in general. During class we all had moral qualms with “voluntourism” and similar outreaches so it was reassuring to hear from native Nicaraguans about how organizations like Bridges and the Fabretto Foundation were very locally grown and supported. It was definitely evident in a few presentations how talking to our collaborators helped them focus their research and tailor their eventual projects to the population we would be serving with the amenities we would have. I think the most enjoyable part of Skyping with our Nicaraguan collaborators was hearing and answering their questions about us. I personally often seem to forget to consider how the rest of the world sees us Americans so when the URACAAN students started grilling us about politics and Donald Trump it really stopped me in my tracks. While many of us are going in with the intention to conduct ethnographic interviews, I almost want to focus on just having as many conversations as possible because we stand to learn as much from Nicaraguans as they do from us and it’s these kind of questions that reveal a lot about bother of our cultures.

Mike Boudreau’s visit to class was also very informative because we got to hear about Compas de Nicaragua from the man who played a huge part in making it happen. The fact that the organization began in New Hampshire was surprising to me and when I visited their website I was already impressed with how varied and comprehensive their projects were. When Mr. Boudreau came in to talk to us I was especially interested in hearing about Women in Action. I am very interested in women’s social and health issues globally so seeing how this program branched out into so many avenues like housing projects and dance troupes was very heartwarming and also seemed to make a huge impact in these women’s lives. Again, I saw a lot of evidence in final presentations of help from Mike. I think his perspective was really helpful because he had a sense of our American biases regarding what is “normal” behavior and what is not so he could tell us about how Nicaraguan behaviors and attitudes differed. My group got to ask him about sexual health and practices in Nicaragua and found that very informative to our research and also survey questions. Overall, getting to meet and speak to our Nicaraguan collaborators, as well as learn about the many organizations that are active in the area, was very helpful because it gave us a better sense of what to expect and also helped refine our information and perspective so that we could help the people we serve as best as possible.