Long-term NDI community projects are designed to inspire, uplift, and educate local peoples. Projects in Nicaragua aim to stimulate local volunteerism, engender community participation and make permanent change. Currently NDI has 3 ongoing long-term projects: Farmers Aid, La Isla Bonita, and Sponsor a Team.

Co-developed with local NDI volunteer, Nestor Guzman Dinarte, this program has two arms - providing education to local farmers and promoting solidarity with farmers and foreign students. This program matches participants that attend our global health courses with local farmers so students can learn where their food comes from and the joys and difficulties of being a subsistence farmer. Students also have the opportunity to link health issues that result from farming with clinical experience. The program promotes solidarity between North and Latin Americans with the goal to help develop friendships between the two groups.  Local farmer education initiatives have included working with tobacco farmers to diminish toxic pesticide exposure.  In 2008, entomologist, Linda Wiener from Santa Fe, New Mexico offered her expertise to help investigate a series of poisonings in tobacco workers. Thru Linda’s engagement with the community and investigative sleuthing work, she was able to identify the cause as Green Tobacco Sickness, a common illness that affects tobacco workers worldwide. Working in collaboration with all constituents involved, NDI led meetings that included local tobacco pickers (all women and children), tobacco farmers, tobacco companies that buy from the farmers, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Mayors Office.

As garbage service is cost prohibitive for many families and the community does not provide sufficient trashcans, littering is commonplace.  Often families will burn trash to forego the expense of trash collection. This trash, especially plastic bags, bottles, glass, tin cans and other containers, fill up with rain creating still water – the perfect breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes.  The result is an increase in both risk and transmission of dengue fever and other diseases. The Ministry of Health organizes trash clean up to educate the public on the importance of keeping their living spaces clean and NDI participates whenever possible.  In 2008, NDI began coordinating with local youth organizer, Olivier Salomón Mora Juárez of Esquipulas, Ometepe, to implement an island wide trash clean up program that will engage youth teams.


Sponsor a Team

NDI began by sponsoring a baseball team from Los Angeles, Ometepe. In the past, players did not practice and often arrived at the games intoxicated. New uniforms engendered a sense of pride in the team and in self.  Players are attending regular practices on time and intoxication is virtually eliminated. Additionally, men on the island who rarely go to the hospital are now offered yearly physical examinations with an NDI physician. What seemed like a simple project has done more for the health of the entire community than any medicine. In 2008, a program is in development to combine sport sponsorship in youth teams with AIDS/HIV education programs. The goal is to work with kids to get more education about safe sex practices and condom use and the importance of getting tested for HIV.