La RAAN
by Hannah Robbins on February 7, 2010
Two weeks ago Rachel and I traveled to a city called Siuna to learn more about the work Salud Sin Limite is doing in La RAAN. La RAAN, the North Atlantic Autonomous region, has a fascinating history full of the detrimental influences of colonialism (the Atlantic coast was colonized by England, whereas the Pacific coast was colonized by Spain), conflict between indigenous and non-indigenous groups, a strong presence of Sandinistas (though it seems like everyone in Ortega's Nicaragua is a Sandinista...or at least they say they are), and the extraction of natural resources by foreign interests in spite of laws against such practice (Costa Rica, Canada, and our very own U.S. of A. seem to circumvent their own stringent environmental laws by extracting resources from the Bosawas reserve, where laws exist, but aren't well enforced).
This video explains a little more about Siuna and the work of Salud Sin Limite. Frazzled by the sound of the arriving plane behind me and trying to translate from Spanish (¨jovenes promotores¨) to English, I left out some statistics and information that may help put things in perspective:
- Siuna has a total population of around 80,000 people (20% of whom live in the one main city and 80% in the surrounding 140 rural communities). The one private ambulance you see for a moment in the video is meant to attend to this entire population.
- Salud Sin Limite´s main project is working with both urban and rural primary and secondary students to train them as health promoters for their communities. The health promoters share the knowledge they learn from health ¨tecnicos¨ with children and parents in their community and sometimes travel to other communities to train new health promoters. The current theme of the health promoters ¨charlas¨, or health talks, is sexual health and reproductive rights.
- The health promoters of the urban center of Siuna have also been developing health-focused radionovelas. Check out their program on Sunday at 2pm central time here!
This post is #6 of an ongoing series for the GlobeMed Partner Search Fellows Program, through which GlobeMed's two PSFP Fellows, Rachel Berkowitz and Hannah Robbins, aim to build partnerships between GlobeMed and 15 new community-based health NGOs in Central and South America. These posts will help us follow their journey, as Rachel and Hannah help GlobeMed expand to new university chapters and community-based partners this coming year. To read the entire series of blog posts, click here.
dayling says on February 17, 2010 at 2:19pm:
hola soy dayling de siuna sel grupo de radio de salud sin limites hi!!!!