Posted March 11, 2016 by
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My HNGR Experience in Nicaragua
Wheaton's Human Needs and Global Resources program (HNGR) was in large part the deciding factor for why I came to Wheaton. I have wanted to do HNGR since I first heard about it as a junior in high school and met with former director Dr. Paul Robinson to learn more about the program. Last year, after much preparation and growth, I departed for my HNGR internship in Jinotepe, Carazo, Nicaragua to work with an incredible organization called Fundación San Lucas Nicaragua, which is a part of the Luke Society, a network of integral health-based Christian ministries directed and operated by local people. San Lucas serves rural communities in the dry-tropical, coastal region of Carazo to promote health and well-being by working in food security, water & sanitation, and risk prevention and management with a specific focus on women and children.
As an environmental science major with a passion for agriculture and soils, I worked with the food security team, shadowing and being apprenticed by two caring and intelligent agronomists as they facilitated agricultural workshops with small-holder farmers, worked to plant, weed, and water the crops in San Lucas’s Agriculture and Appropriate Technologies Experimental Center, and responded to a crippling climate change induced drought caused by El Niño. This drought and the way that my host organization and the farmers in the communities where we worked responded to it characterized life in Nicaragua for me more than anything else. Never before have I spent so much time thinking about, asking about, and praying for rain. Rain means life for subsistence farmers who have no other means of income or sustenance but for the basic grains they are able to cultivate on their small plots of land. When the rain fails to fall, everything is lost: seed, food, water. Drought devastates and the most vulnerable suffer. I learned though, that drought does not have the last word – life does. When all else failed, faith sustained. Together with the farmers and coworkers I befriended, I learned how to say, “The Lord is my Shepherd and I shall not be in want” with trust while lacking the basic necessities for life.
Kelly Wilson '16 is a senior studying environmental studies. Learn more about Wheaton's HNGR program on their website.
Photo caption: Kelly working in the field with Fundación San Lucas Nicaragua during her HNGR internship in Nicaragua in 2015.