Peace Corps 2.0

On May 20^th, 2015 I finished my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nicaragua. I was able to celebrate by ringing the bell with many others from my group. I am proud of my group and grateful for all of the wonderful support from Peace Corps staff and my family and friends both in Nicaragua and the US.

Since then I spent most of June in Nicaragua, applying for US Residency for my husband, which he got pretty quickly. We moved back to Madison together about a week ago and have a lot of culture shock ahead of us.

On Our Way

Rural villages like this one previously did not offer secondary classes,
now the Ministry of Education is offering secondary classes in 10 of
the 40 villages in my municipality. This has helped reduce the teenage
pregnancy rate on a local scale.

When I first got to my site almost two years ago I learned about all of the health disparities and challenges that my counterparts at the Ministry of Health are up against every day. Just to name a few, there was a high rate of teenage pregnancy. Around 30% of all pregnancies were to girls under the age of 18. Our casa materna (house for pregnant women to wait for their due date, so that they can get to the health center on time to give birth) was fairly new. It didn't have much to offer women ever since the NGO funding it had pulled out. It was essentially just a bed and a sheet to sleep on, rice, oil and 2 pots in the kitchen, a dirty bathroom and place to wash clothing by hand out back.