David Hong

When I first started in the Global Social Benefit Fellowship, I don’t think I knew or could imagine how much of an impact that it would have on me. Now that I am on the last leg of this fellowship, I understand that this fellowship is so much than just an education in social entrepreneurship or action research in the field; it is an alteration of perspective; it is a radically different viewpoint of the world: The world and environment is hurting; people are hurting, and we are in a unique time and position when we can address the most pressing issues in world through social entrepreneurship to benefit people and the world in a sustainable, lasting, and deeply impactful way. As I look back on my time in Nicaragua, I know that for me, being able to offer something useful was one avenue of social engagement that was meaningful to me; this could be anything from knowledge to a skill and even to a task. On the day to day scale, this meant going out in the field and obtaining information to inform ASDENIC on things they may not possibly know already.

The beautiful greens of Nicaragua.

However, many times it felt like we were not the ones providing but the ones needing the help; I remember one example was with Santiago, an ASDENIC employee who accompanied us on all our community visits, when he would speak to all of the community members present for interviews about social entrepreneurship and on behalf of us.

Aidan and Santiago

By speaking on our behalf as a recognized employee of ASDENIC, he gave us credibility and established a level of trust between us and community members—something we would never have been able to do on our own. For me, that meant a lot. Learning from community members and from members of ASDENIC was equally important as being able to offer something in the sense that they contributed to my knowledge, character growth, and cultural awareness. It is a give and take that I hope will only grow bigger in the future as I hope to apply my further education and experience in the scope of social development whether that be in social entrepreneurship or not.  If I could speak for myself in future, I would say that I would absolutely go into social entrepreneurship in some aspect especially in social enterprises that are involved in healthcare and medicine. I want to, after obtaining a medical degree, directly participate either as an employee of an enterprise or as an aid to the enterprise much like what the executives do as GSBI mentors. Regardless, this fellowship has implanted social entrepreneurship into my mind so much so that I know that I want to someday be directly involved with a social enterprise.

A focus group with community members in Daraili.

As a I think about what the Global Social Benefit Fellowship means to me, it’s hard to articulate exactly why I feel so different. If I can’t use words, I know that I feel different in the sense that I have a direction. I don’t know the exact path, but I have the general direction. I feel a sense of urgency, a yearning, even a sense of obligation that we have to—we need to do something to help alleviate the suffering of people and the world. If I had to use words, I would say there are three of the biggest takeaways of how this fellowship has impacted my worldview.

A girl holding a jug of juice.

1) Social entrepreneurship is the key to the world’s most pressing issues. It is an entrepreneurial, radically innovative mindset to a business deeply imbedded with a social mission. It is sustainable, lasting, and impactful. I love that philosophy.

2) As a society, a culture, and as a collective whole, we can no longer proceed as we have done so far. There is an indebtedness that we own to make a change in the world for the better.

A water storage tank for irrigation.

3) Personally, I feel an enormous tugging. I believe I am truly blessed and fortunate. My talents are not my own. My worldly possessions are not my own and to who do I owe everything? I owe it to God. I cannot imagine myself, at the end of my life, knowing that I lived my life only having served myself. Knowing that I am so blessed and fortunate to be where I am, to have what I have, to be who I am, and to have people that I have around me, I know that I must use everything given to me to contribute to this world and to be in service to God. As to what exactly this means, I am not entirely sure—maybe it is the philosophy of the early members of the society of Jesus in “helping souls”. Where education was a key expression of that philosophy, I believe medicine to be where I can best be utilized. Then again, I do not know what God’s plan is for me, and if I am called somewhere else, then I will go there. But for now, I know one thing, that time is moving by incredibly fast; we must do everything we can before we are no longer on this earth.

Elia, Aidan, and I enjoying the beauty of a waterfall.

There were two major feelings that surfaced when we visited communities in order to conduct surveys and interviews. One feeling encompassed a desire of wanting to be immersed completely and totally in the lives of the community members. What would daily life be like if I lived here?

Yet at the same time, another, opposing feeling arose that made me feel distinctly aware of my separateness from the people in these communities. To answer my question above, could I (would I?) ever truly know what it would mean to walk the daily lives of the people there? In addition to the beautiful aspects of their lifestyle, could I accept the grim realities too? Could I ever know what it was like to not have clean drinking water? Or to live harvest to harvest? I don’t know. Could I one day understand? Maybe. But now, I don’t think I can. This realization brought in me all sorts of emotions of restlessness and sadness.

How was it fair, that the person right in front of me will live life unsecured of basic amenities such as clean water? Whereas I, not two hours prior to arriving to the community, drink clean, bottled water in my interviews with community members. How was it fair that I can drive to their communities, interview them about their lives, ask them about how poor their water conditions are, make well-wished propositions on a clean drinking water enterprise (which hopefully one day will be realized), and then leave their homes back to my hotel where good food, clean water, and comparable luxury can be found?

The worst part of it was that my feelings of empathy (or was it sympathy?) were outweighed by this feeling of relief. I would think to myself after visiting these communities, “Wow, the conditions here are terrible. But we don’t have to live this reality. We can leave. We can go home.”

How can I see such poverty and illness in the world yet display such grateful complacency and ignorant blissfulness?…

I believe in the sentiment that I won a geo-socio-economic lottery that privileges me to the very pinnacle of a pyramid that has billions of people below it. The crazy, mind-blowing thing is that I did absolutely nothing to deserve it. Absolutely nothing. With this realization having been slowly molded deep into my heart, I cannot accept a future that only serves myself. With the opportunities, the education, the God-given gifts, and the privileges granted to me, I know that I want to—I need to affect change that serves others.

My first night under the mosquito net

A water tank in Bramadero. The water system is very old and water isn’t properly processed.

A small, plastic version of the biosand filter.

“We are born to be free”

Our guide, our friend, and our liaison, Santiago.

A private water faucet with a LaMotte water testing kit.

I need to take things day by day, step by step, and one step over the next or else I may have to call over my two teammates, Aidan and Elia, to come over and resuscitate me. It’s a little bit of an over-exaggeration, but it does truthfully reflect a part of my current emotional state in my 5th week here in Nicaragua: frustrated, discouraged, and stressed. I feel frustrated with the pace of my own learning of Spanish. It is progressing! But it… is… painfully…… slow… There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to truly convey what you mean to say or to be lost in conversation. I feel discouraged for the same reasons. On the bright side, I have found a light chuckle and a genial smile to be quite the asset when I don’t completely understand someone…

Needless to say, the learning pains are not stopping me from trying, and I am well reminded of my own silly and embarrassing mistakes as there is a current list of my spoken mishaps courtesy of Aidan (all in love and fun jokes I know!). Finally, I feel stressed for fear of not being able to achieve everything we set out to achieve in our time here—since we had a bit of a slow start, we just started making our first visits to the communities. Without a doubt, living abroad to a different country is hard. Acclimating yourself to a different country is hard! And trying to overcome language barriers is HARD! Whoever said this stuff was easy?!

Despite it all, there is still so much that has happened and so much to look forward to. Our first highlight of our trip so far has been with the “Intercambio”, a youth exchange convention where students and employees from various universities and organizations from Mexico, Nicaragua, and University of California Santa Cruz come together.

Welcome to the 6th annual Intercambio!

Although an initial culture shock, the Intercambio soon turned out to be an amazing experience where ideas, advice, concerns, and information were exchanged and presented. For example, we learned about the way cooperatives function (groups of small-scale farmers that come together for greater economic outreach and potential), and we actually had the opportunity to visit several of them.

The inside of the PRODECOOP coffee processing plant.

To the left, you can see the processing plant of one of the most successful coffee cooperatives in the region, PRODECOOP. Here, they process thousands of pounds of coffee to be distributed throughout the world. Through their success, they have branched out to other areas of networking such as a food distribution and exchange center that allows small scale farmers to exchange unwanted surplus crop for another type of crop.

Even more valuable than the information that I learned were the people I got to meet and the cultural interactions that I had the opportunity to experience. It was so interesting to learn about the country specific colloquial expressions that don’t exist in the english language.

Cultural cooking night where teams from each organization or University comes up with a recipe that is “typical” of their country.

Friends!

After that crazy week of the Intercambio, we had an off-week that was starkly different in pace because we couldn’t start yet making community visits to start our research as a result of transportation issues. Thus, it wasn’t until the 4th week that we made our first visit a community called Buena Vista, a rural community about 2 hours away from Estelí.

High in the mountains, Buena Vista did, in fact, have good views (buenas vistas).

It isn’t until now, in our 5th week here in Nicaragua, that we are truly diving into our research plan. It took 5 weeks. 5 weeks! Here are some observations and realizations that I have made so far: 1) We’re constantly learning new information—whether it’s information about the communities we’re going to visit, or information about our host organization, ASDENIC. It is mostly good news. However, there are instances where we hear something, or we receive a document, and we say to ourselves, “we should’ve gotten this before we even landed.”

We accompanied our research mentor, Professor Bacon on a focus group session

2) Things take time. For example, part of our research plan is to conduct interviews and surveys. However, in our meetings with ASDENIC, we have been told that we first need to get to know a community better before we can start any sort of formalized surveys. This completely makes sense. However from a logistical viewpoint, we are on time crunch. With only 3 weeks left in Nicaragua and a community visit taking a whole day, that’s just more time expended. As a result, I have felt and still feel nervous about gathering enough data for our research plan. 3) Finally, I have realized early on that our research plan is subject to change. In addition to the fact that things absolutely do not go the way you planned it to go, we are realizing that we need to keep our minds open to change. It’s unsettling at first, but then you realize it’s all part of the process.

Although my initial introduction may have conveyed an overall demoralized emotional state, I don’t think it is at all uncommon. I can’t speak for all fellows, but I think we’re all feeling and experiencing some sort of pressure or difficulty in some way. When I shared some of my frustrations to someone close to me, they told me this, “the reward for our actions is greater and means more when we have to struggle for them”. I think it’s absolutely true. I think one of the reasons why our emotions run so high, especially in light of difficulties, is because we care so much. Personally, I truly want this project to succeed and I want to see the eventual fruition of a self-sustainable, successful, and effective water social enterprise here in Nicaragua; I know that Elia and Aidan want the same thing as well.

Some days I tell myself, there only “x amount of weeks left!” But who knows, maybe by the 8th week, I will wonder where the time went and if I could just have a little bit longer here. I was just getting used to it…