Skip to main content

From Honduras

I have been working with the non-profit Global Brigades on a series of home infrastructure projects! Students from UC Davis, UCLA and Maryland united forces to become the "Bruggies" and work with the rural community of Zurzular.

We’ve been pouring cement floors in homes to alleviate the prevalence of Chaggas disease, building special stoves to help combat respiratory problems, building latrines and pilas for water storage, and teaching classes in Spanish about the human body to the children.

In Honduras, I found enjoyment in simple pleasures: long bus rides across Honduras’ beautiful, mountainous terrain, dancing to the tunes of Latin reggaeton, making friendship bracelets for new friends, plantains as a guest-star in every meal and in a new form. The sun rose, I spent the day doing construction, and then the sun set. The Internet and the rush of daily life felt so far away.

My time with the community of Zurzular was brief, but action-packed. I met great people, learned new skills, immersed myself with a fascinating foreign culture. I used my UC Davis Blum Center student project grant (2011) to get to Honduras as an opportunity for me to work both in poverty alleviation and as an opportunity for personal reflection on development.

The experience was humbling, to say the least. My major lets me study how to empower communities, and this trip was certainly a good exercise in praxis. Public health initiatives are definitely a real and viable solution to some of the serious inequalities that exist in this world.

Our projects, while small, did help improve the quality of life for the families we worked with. They are also sustainable and efficient. For example, the eco-stoves use less firewood, which means cutting back on deforestation and the amount of time spent gathering wood. Having water storage devices frees up time to advance economic mobility rather than spending hours walking to wells and collecting water. It’s things like this that we take for granted back home in the United States. We forget how interconnected social and economic forces are with health.

Good health should not be a privilege: it is a basic right. I thank the Blum Center for this incredible opportunity, and look forward to continuing my involvement in community development and public health initiatives.



Deborah Schrimmer, undergraduate, Community and Regional Development (with minor in Latin)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to the UC Davis Blum Center Blog!

Here you will find updates on our organization, and blog posts written by each of our Blum Fellows about their experiences abroad. Make sure to check out our website at blumcenter.ucdavis.edu, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCDavisBlumCenter to get regular updates and see our upcoming events.
Post a Comment
Read more

Manufacturing in Phnom Penh by Purva Juvekar

During winter and spring quarter 2017, my teammates and I (Team WASHOut) designed a sanitation station using a Biosand Filter. This was our effort towards providing clean water to students in floating schools on the Tonle Sap lake. We were provided with the opportunity to go to Cambodia and implement our project in person through the Blum grant, and we worked with Wetlands Work!, our clients for the senior design class. Figure 1 Rendering of Sanitation Station   We spent our time at UC Davis designing the station – sketches, CAD models, renderings, dimensions, engineering analysis and testing. We made a prototype in Davis, which we showed during the Senior Design Showcase in June, to test flow rates and water quality standards. The next step was to take the design to Phnom Penh and manufacture it there. We got to work as soon as we got there. My teammate and I were introduced to people on the WW! team who could help with translation, and we began scouting the city to fin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing, By Abe McKay

Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing (3 of 3) 2017.09.12 In my second week in Kenya, I was back to visiting farmers, both with Vibrant Village and through other connections. However, I receive my biggest surprize in between site visits. I was walking with Ernest Kulali, a field officer and farmer from Vibrant Village, and he was telling me about the effectiveness of farming techniques. Using traditional methods, Ernest was getting 20kg of maize (corn) in a season from his shamba , his farm . When he switched to using purchased seeds and fertilizer, the same land produced 360 to 540kg of maize. What!? I had him run the numbers by me again, 20kgs → the range of 400kgs. I still didn’t believe it, but Nick the Vibrant Village director later agreed that farmers were seeing that magnitude of increase. Not just doubling their income/food supply, but a twenty-fold return! Further farming modifications will not yield as large a jump, but that sort of scale encouraged me that changing te...
Post a Comment
Read more