also, “which treats of the time our protagonist felt like a white rabbit in Wonderland”

 

I so wish I hadn’t waited until four days of being in-country to write this blog post. It was supposed to be written two days before my scheduled departure. However, two days before I left for Nicaragua I was in Honduras with Global Brigades on a medical and public health brigade while the envelope that contained this prompt was 1,910 miles away in Pearland, Texas. It’s now almost impossible to retroactively think about what I thought and expected. Primarily because my expectations have been dramatically influenced by the four days I’ve been in Masaya so far. However, this past semester I received an amazing piece of advice about uncovering one’s expectations: when you experience a moment of shock, disappointment, or amazement, you’ve just subconsciously unmasked an expectation. So, I’ll use that advice to try to answer the following prompt: “You are departing in two days, absent any in-country exposure, what are your expectations for your experience abroad, the service work/social issue you will addressing, your role as a Loewenstern Fellow?”

I expect my experience abroad to be reflective. Not only do I believe that I will have the time, I want the time to be fruitful. I also expect the people to be friendly, warm, and open, as this is what I was told by a native Nicaraguan now living and working in the states. I also expect Nicaraguans to be very talkative, again an established expectation because of the native Nicaraguan and an experienced traveler I spoke with before my departure. With this expectation of conversation, I hope my time abroad will always carry the theme of communication. I want to be reflective: communication with myself. I want to learn about Nicaragua not only through experience but also through conversation. I also want to learn about my service work/social issue of public health through conversation. One of the public health programs within the health center that I’ll be interning at is the daily “charla,” and the translation of charla is a talk or a chat.

I expect the service work/social issue I will be addressing to be slow. I was told to expect a different work rhythm, a different pace of life. I look forward to such a radical change to how I’ve been living, but I also know it’s going to be difficult for me. Throughout these last few weeks of the spring semester, I’ve had this overwhelming feeling of being “out of time” at Rice and with my undergraduate education. I feel like the little white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Thus I expect this pace change to be good for me because objectively I’m not out of time: I’m 19 years old, I have 2 years left of college, and I haven’t even begun my career (what I will actually dedicate most of my life and time to).

Public health is also, by nature, slow. It’s the first (and, in my opinion, most significant) of the three-leveled pyramid of prevention. It’s not a screening or a test where one can know the results within minutes (ie. a pregnancy test), days (a TB test), or the longest being a few weeks (papanicolaou/pap smear). It’s not tertiary prevention either where medicine or a treatment can reduce your symptoms within an hour or cure you completely in a few days or weeks. It’s the big base of the pyramid. It’s large, slow, and all-encompassing. It entails the slip-ups a pre-diabetic patient will make when they buy a bag of cold, sweet juice from a street vendor because it’s just so hot and humid outside. The struggle to incorporate daily exercise into a routine that has been comfortable for many years now. The difficulty of incorporating more vegetables and salads into your diet when you’re surrounded by sweet, in-season fruit such as mangos, pineapple, melons, etc. Within that base is also the silent victory of avoiding an official diagnosis of diabetes because your many months and years of little healthy habits were significant enough to ward off a major disease.

I expect my role as a Loewenstern Fellow to be challenging. I expect to be challenged holistically. I expect to be challenged as a student, as a future health professional, as a female, as a young adult, and as a human. I will be challenged by my surroundings, strangers, friends, peers, family, my experience, knowledge, ignorance, my past, present, and future, and by myself.

 

In short, I have great expectations for everything.