While I have a fair bit of experience with ethnography, I am a bit wary about conducting ethnography in Nicaragua. My most notable experience with ethnography was for a final project for my Intro to Public Health class during freshman year. My group and I were working with a community partner, WISE of the Upper Valley, to interpret data from the AAU Survey on Campus Climate about Dartmouth. This survey contained data about opinions on and personal experiences with consent, dating, and sex on college campuses and included national aggregate data as well as individual reports for colleges, including Dartmouth. I took this class during fall term and WISE was going to begin having an on campus advocate starting in the upcoming winter term so we communicated with her to find out what information she would find useful to ease her transition from working with mainly women in the Upper Valley to Dartmouth. We first compared Dartmouth specific data to the national information to notable differences between the two and then decided to explore a few topics further using ethnographic interviewing. Among the four of us we interviewed many Dartmouth students spanning all classes, genders, races, sexualities, and experiences with Greek Life in an attempt to explain these drastic differences and then compiled our interviews into concise deliverables and made concrete recommendations for WISE, especially their on campus representative, to better understand campus climate but also make positive change. This experience with ethnography was all encompassing because my group and I took it from start to finish and I definitely learned a lot about Dartmouth culture.

Through my experiences I found that the most important part of conducting ethnography is not so much the questions asked but the dynamic between the interviewer and interviewee, how comfortable your subject is, and how open they are to talking and sharing. This is exactly why I am apprehensive about conducting ethnography in Nicaragua. I have very limited knowledge of Spanish and negligible conversational experience so I would really be unable to conduct an interview on my own. I really enjoy listening to people’s thoughts and stories that seem to just come out from doing ethnography and I am disappointed that I will likely miss out on this experience. My group and I formulated our final project similarly to my Public Health project with interpreting collected data to inform ethnographic interviewing but the format is highly adaptable and we have talked to other groups in the community health team about combining our interests and projects so that we can focus on one issue or two and guide all of our ethnographies in tat direction so we can really get a good sample size and uncover new insights about the population we are serving. With my language handicap I may have to be in the background for this but I still have hope that I can find a good rapport with a patient or reliable translator to allow me to conduct ethnography on my own. My favorite part of doing service is the communication and connections I make with the people I am serving and I think ethnography is a great way of doing so because it allows you to learn about the culture of the people from themselves and I am looking forward to all that ethnography can do for us in Nicaragua.