I can’t believe that the summer is quickly passing us by and it is only one week until we go to Nicaragua. I am in grad school to become a family nurse practitioner and I am finding that it is hard to focus on both school and prepare for this mission trip. My classes actually end a few days before we leave for Nicaragua, which means I really need to work on both. It’s amazing how many of my previous experiences have prepared me for this mission trip.

I heard about this mission trip last October and it intrigued me. In nursing school, I went to Peru for a mission trip with the Christian Medical and Dental Association. It was a wonderful experience. The 60 students and health professionals saw over 6,000 patients. We were able to individually pray with almost every patient (only one person refused prayer), treat many health concerns, and see God at work. The only regret I had was regarding the individuals we treated with worms, but did not educate on how to prevent a reoccurrence. Who knows how long of a reprieve they had before they had worms again. I graduated and went to work at the hospital, but my experience in Peru really changed my life. I realized that some things would never change without education. I later became a School Public Health Nurse, where most of my job was educating children (and sometimes parents, teachers, and staff) about health. I taught kids and their parents about specific health concerns and connected them to resources in the community, but a good portion of my job was teaching classrooms of students about hand washing, nutrition, dental health, and hygiene, among other health topics. It was surprising to go to the hygiene training and find that they taught the people in Nicaragua the same content (you can’t really change the content of health promotion too much!) with the same techniques that I have already used in the classroom. How cool is that? I am looking forward to educating the people about clean water and excited to share with the people how Jesus is the living water. I hope that I am able to be an influence to the people in Nicaragua and I hope that the people in Nicaragua are able to be an influence in my life.

In addition to teaching the people in Nicaragua about clean water, I am looking forward to teaching the people about how to respond to illness. One of the new things I learned in the hygiene training was called a diarrhea doll. It illustrates how fast an infant or child loses water when they have diarrhea and how important it is to rehydrate them quickly. Rehydrate.org states that 26% of childhood deaths (ages 28 days to 5 years) is caused by dehydration and the key causes of diarrhea are unclean water, dirty hands at mealtime, and spoilt food. I hope that the clean water and training in hygiene can increase their health and as a result decrease the devastating results of unclean water.

We appreciate your prayers and support for this mission trip.