Skip to main content

Saying Good-Bye by Samantha Lawton



Figure 1. Hilario, vet promoter and project supporter, and I working on a chicken coop.

It’s now three days before I leave Sabana Grande and I am unsure when I will be coming back. Next year I move straight into the clinical year of my veterinary degree, which means I have no summer break and no time to travel to Nicaragua. The projects we have worked on this year will pass onto other students who have worked with us throughout the year and are very familiar with our partnerships and objectives.

I am very sad to be leaving this community; when I stepped off the bus this summer I felt instantly at ease. We had survived the bus journey (sometimes difficult to imagine for those of us who get motion sick) and arrived to a group of familiar faces. People in Sabana Grande have been incredibly open to new ideas, to the strange people walking around, and to a multitude of questions about their animals. With the workshop attendees and my homestay families I have shared many laughs, especially on account of my horribly accented Spanish. Our community partners have helped support me through many frustrations and everyone in town has taught me about farming, rural medicine and teaching.
 
Figure 2 The beautiful Sabana Grande early in the wet season.

My experiences in Sabana Grande have made it clear to me – I want to work in development, I want to experience other cultures, and I want to exchange knowledge with other people. This project has empowered me tremendously, and I now want to use the skills I have learned to empower others. I hope I can return to my friends in Sabana Grande in the future, sit down over an egg breakfast, and discuss all that we have done since we last met.

Comments

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.

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...

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...