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Frederpca Ghesquiere '04 and Isabel Casariego '04 during the December Cross Cultural Education and Service Project in Nicaragua

The William Jewett Tucker Foundation, in conjunction with Bridges to Community (a not for profit organization that coordinates volunteer service-learning trips to developing countries), chose Nicaragua as the site for its first Cross Cultural Education and Service Project because of the substantial needs of the Nicaraguan people. Nicaragua is thesecond poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.The Cross Cultural Education and Service Program empowers undergraduates with the primary role in organizing and running each project by appointing them to seven different managerial positions in the areas of construction, clinical and public health, and cultural affairs. The responsibilities of the student leaders include everything from raising money for medical supplies and planning the daily work agenda to coordinating all travel details and supervising daily logistics on site.

The Cross Cultural Education and Service program is designed to operate as an integrative effort involving the Tucker Foundation, the Thayer School of Engineering, the Dartmouth Medical School, the Tuck School of Business, and Dartmouth undergraduates by using our combined resources to enhance the knowledge base of the program. I am particularly proud of the collaboration among the many academic departments that joined to design and teach the term-long non-credit academic course taught to all undergraduates in the program. Professors from the departments of Music, History, Sociology, Mathematics,Anthropology, Geography, English, Environmental Studies and Obstetrics & Gynecology provided lectures. The course is taught with the belief that students must understand the history, the sociopolitical forces and the culture of the community in which they will be immersed for them to effectively work for change. The Rassias Foundation also assisted by providing team members with weekly Spanish immersion sessions before their departure.

Our medical team consisted of undergraduates, DHMC fourth-year medical students, physicians and a nurse practitioner.Together they provided preventive and acute care to over 700 local patients. William Young,MD, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Dartmouth Medical School, treated patients at a local maternity facility. The medical team delivered preventive care in various forms. Not only were diagnoses and prescriptions given in ad hoc clinics, but the team also established de-worming clinics, educated patients on hygiene in a skit they acted out (to the particular delight of the local children) and educated patients about their specific illnesses at public health stations within each clinic.

Dr.Young, as one example, saw approximately 14 patients each day who were pre-screened for obstetrics and gynecology consults by an assisting undergraduate. Many women had challenging afflictions. One evening, Dr.Young recalled to me his treatment of a teenager who was pregnant at 30 weeks with her second baby. Although she was pale, feeble and shaking desperately with malaria, she refused hospitalization because she was needed at home. She asked only for medicines, which he provided. She then walked the three-hour journey back to her village.

One mother died at the hospital the day the team arrived. She had a transverse lie—a baby trying to birth sideways. After two days of obstructed labor, she was carried in a hammock for several hours to the road and then to the hospital, but it was too late for her and the baby. The team was told that 12 mothers from the rural area had died in childbirth during the past year.As women repeatedly refused cervical cancer screening due to the extra three dollar cost, the team decided to pay for them and nearly all future patients accepted the offer.The public health team held two days of classes for twenty traditional birth midwives. When asked what they took to a delivery, all answered,“A blanket for me to sleep.” They mentioned nothing else. A candle is their only source of light; a machete their only surgical instrument, used to cut umbilical cords.

Despite the impact of the medical team, the construction site proved to be the cross cultural nexus of the program. Robert Frost may have said,“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” yet, in our case, it was the construction of a wall that built not a barrier between two neighbors but a new pathway between them.The process of building a concrete wall from raw materials became a microcosm of human interdependency. Block-cutters may not initially have known the names of the persons shaping rebar enforcement, or have spoken the same language as those mixing cement, yet construction team members soon realized the interreliance required of them to build a strong durable wall.

As the wall was built, barriers between people were broken.Team members from both countries found themselves sweaty, dirty and weary at the end of each day. Songs rained through the air as shovels cleaved their paths through the earth. Students from different nations learned that they each enjoyed Motown music, wanted to become journalists, and that they had both lost parents to illness. One day our wall may become weak and need replacement, but there is an undeniable assurance that the human understanding formed in making that wall is an edifice that will endure.

In my experience, when a third world service trip is successful, it is always in part because individuals have found endless opportunities for joy though they were living in places of the most crushing poverty. Of the students I have talked to, the memories they most recall are not of streets choked with garbage nor their growling stomachs left unsatiated by meals of rice and beans twice a day. They do not talk about the suffocating heat, the ubiquitous throngs of flies or the obstreperous morning din of roosters and pigs that prevents anyone from sleeping past 6 a.m. At no time on our trip did we submit to that which our human weaknesses often compel us under adversity by complaining or bickering. Instead,we tapped into our human strengths — humility, resiliency, and laughter — and found ourselves drawn closer together. It is said that it is sometimes out of the ashes that a glorious human spirit arises. To those that doubt the reality of a transcendent human spirit, I invite you to work in a third world country.

“Eat this very slowly. We don’t know when we will have this chance again,” were the words I overheard spoken by one of the URAACAN students to his schoolmates during our last dinner in Siuna. It was not, however, merely to food that this young man was referring. It was to our friendship as well. “You are the first group to really treat us as equals,” confided another URAACAN student to me earlier that day. I believe she said this because we didn’t just work with them and go our separate ways during mealtime. They were not simply tools to help us translate Spanish, find the local water source, or repair our broken bus.We worked together, lived together, and played together. We had planted the seeds of a community. Seeds that are planted in such a way grow in the choices we make after our experience. Those choices stem from the questions:“Why can’t I stop thinking about Nicaragua?” and “What do I do from here?”

Already we are seeing the seeds of our trip blossom. We plan to continue our efforts in Nicaragua for the next five to ten years. This upcoming fall,we hope to work with the Tuck School of Business and send a delegation to Siuna in order that we may develop a strategic plan for those efforts. Hansel Bourdon ‘02, a senior on the trip, has committed the next two years of her life to living in Nicaragua so that she can facilitate Dartmouth’s involvement in strengthening Nicaraguan communities. Joel Wickre‘03, a Biology major on the medical team, noticed a need for clean, running water in Siuna and returned to Dartmouth determined to do something about this need. He has since gained the backing of several professors to design his senior thesis around solving Siuna health issues. This past spring Joel wrote a proposal for a term-long project to analyze the epidemiological impact of heavy metals on the water system from a gold mine that operated in Siuna from the turn of the century until the late 1980s. Sponsored by the Center for Environmental Health Sciences and the Tucker Foundation, Joel and Katie Martin ‘03, put this plan to action by conducting field sampling in Siuna and then analyzing their findings at Dartmouth. Katie has, in turn, recently received endorsement from several professors to write her senior thesis on the political and economic issues of water provision in developing countries.

Because of Joel and Katie’s initiative, new parties have arrived at the table, including UNICEF, the Nicaraguan Water Company, the former mining company and the Mayor of Siuna.This was a community that, for a long time, almost no one wanted to pay attention to, but now that Dartmouth has gotten involved they are starting to realize they have no choice.

We may define our work in Siuna in three areas: housing, health, and education.The Thayer Engineering School, the Medical School, and the College’s science departments have the capacity to assist in housing and health. Dartmouth has extraordinary resources and expertise. The question for us is how do we best use the resources and expertise from our different schools and departments while using the Tucker Foundation as the vinculum for our efforts to enact social change. We should begin by considering the opportunities that Dartmouth leave terms present its students. As Joel and Katie have shown, through this possibility alone, the future for change can be enormous. But we must always listen foremost to the needs of local people and inquire as to how our resources can facilitate their needs, rather than dictate to them what we think their needs are.

This experience has confirmed my belief that the strongest form of community we can build is one where persons of diverse backgrounds find common ground by working for a common purpose, sacrificing a little of their own demands and finding that what they get back is more than they ever gave. Moreover, this experience has shown to me the immense capability that our Dartmouth Community holds to effect positive change in Siuna in the future. The challenge lies not just in achieving, but in finding even more within ourselves once we realize just how capable we are. For many of us at Dartmouth, that will mean going back to Siuna. For all of us, I hope this will mean assessing what we are passionate about and where our individual resources lie. If we realize that this is connecting with others —the building of common ground— that we seek, then with some self-sacrifice, open-mindedness, hard work] and love,we all have the gifts to create common ground everywhere we tread.

Special Thanks to Adam Tanney ’01 for his contribution to this article.