One of the most impactful things for me on the trip to Nicaragua was assisting at the Dental Station. For most Nicaraguans dental hygiene is a luxury. I learned that many children start drinking coffee at the age of 2 and drink juice with every meal. This causes tooth decay but instead of going in to the dentist like a common American would they are forced to live with a dead tooth in their mouth. So many community members came in to the clinic specifically to get teeth pulled and cleaned. The biggest thing that stood out to me was the bravery that these kids and adults had. The dentists did use numbing medicine but after they injected the medicine they immediately began the procedure of the extraction which usually you’re supposed to wait a couple of minutes to let the medicine kick in. Many young children had this procedure done and they barely moved or made a sound. This really showed me how we shouldn’t take for granted the biannual trips to the dentist that we all hate, instead we should be grateful for the resources that are provided to us dentally. I can personally relate to this because after I got my wisdom teeth out I was miserable and constantly complaining of the pain when really I should’ve been happy that I even had the opportunity to get them out.

Going into the trip I must admit that I had no prior knowledge of taking vitals and blood pressure so I was anxious and nervous for my first day of triage. Before we opened the clinic to the community my group practiced on each other how to take blood pressure since all of us weren’t very familiar with how to take it. Everyone seemed like they were getting it on the first or second try and I was still struggling to understand how to do it. Finally as patients were starting to come through I started to pick up the skill through experience and practice. I was so appreciative of all of the patients I took blood pressure on because they were so patient and were interested in what I was doing. If I messed up and had to restart the process they were super understanding and didn’t question it or get mad over it. By the end of my time at triage I felt like a pro taking blood pressure and I really tribute that to all of the patients and my peers because they encouraged me and gave me confidence not to give up through this frustrating process.

Having Public Health after Medical at first discouraged me (even though it’s my major) because we were coming off of three amazing days of treating patients and now we were going to be doing hard manual labor. Since my group was the smallest of only four we were assigned to houses that needed concrete floors that already had the sanitary stations. The process of laying down concrete floors seemed simple since here we’re used to having concrete coming already premixed. Little did I know we had to mix the concrete ourselves which really tested my groups teamwork skills after only have been a group for three days. Both of the families that we worked for were so generous and welcoming in to their homes. For both of the homes the father of the house helped us out along with a community member that was a professional in the area of building concrete floors. I thought it was interesting that the people of the father of the house helped us but I also think it was for the better because then they felt like they were contributing to the project and in the end they would appreciate it more and take care of it better. Public Health was hard but in the end so rewarding because you could physically see the progress being done. Also the idea that we were preventing further sicknesses and parasites was gratifying because in the days earlier in medical we saw so many cases of parasites in younger kids and the main cause for that was not having proper floors and living conditions. To know that our simple act of laying concrete floors for two kitchens could possibly prevent parasites is a feeling that cannot be described.

Our first full day was spent counting medication for our following days on the Medical Brigade. The process was tedious and something that required focus and motivation. We were put into groups of four to work on different groups of medication. I was put into the group of chronic medication and was faced with thousands of packages of Ibuprofen. The sight of the amount of pills we had to count and package discouraged me knowing that we would have to spend all day doing this task. At first my group didn’t know how to tackle this challenge and we spent too much time finding a process that was the most efficient. Finally we agreed that two people would start writing on each bag and the other two would count and start grouping the pills. This challenge really tested our ability to work in a group and how to overcome something that wasn’t easy as a whole group. Even though this day didn’t completely feel like we were making a difference or a major change in the end I felt it was still as rewarding because of the accomplishments we made as a group and the thought that it was going to benefit the brigade in the next few days.