Mission Found :)

Today was our last day of touring around at the places we will be working at for the next month. Before lunch we stopped at Vida Nueva, which is a men's drug and alcohol rehab clinic. The cool thing about Vida Nueva is that it is an open door policy, in which the men can come and go as they please and they are not forced to do anything. They aren't given any drugs to help with the rehabilitation and therapy is focused on doing things such as cooking, playing sports, making things, and their relationship with God. All the men spoke so highly of the clinic and said that other rehab centers are violent and degrading which makes recovery much more difficult. To be placed in Vida Nueva the men has to go through a interview process to determine if it is really in their heart and mind to become sober. Once at Vida Nueva they are placed under some strict rules, they are not allowed to work, make money, leave the house, or have any possessions such as cellphones, cameras, etc for one whole year! Once they make it to their second year sober, they get privileges to start working, making money, having material possessions, leaving the house, etc kind of like a year sober gift! One of the men makes jewlry as a form of his therapy and he gave each of us a bracelet and said that when we visit again he will have rosaries for us. The also gave us a beautiful picture of Jesus in a photo frame that they made. It looked like painted wood but it actually was rolled up paper that had been painted. We hope there is some way we can transport it home to the College of Nursing. Oh and the men challenged us to a soccer game the next time we visit :) Marianne is planning on doing her teaching project at Vida Nueva with the men so we told them that after the project, the game is on! 

 After lunch we visited with a women's group here at SS called Vaso de Leche. These women meet every Monday and have bible study, talk and teach each other things and then they take what they talked about back into their villages and teach others. Another important thing they do is making sure that the young children in their village have breakfast. They all went around and told us their names and what they do here at SS. We then showed them how to do the Cupid Shuffle which they absolutely LOVED! We started to feel right at home with these women. We then sat back down and we asked them if they had any questions for us or things they would like to learn. We were so surprised when more than five hands shot up and they started saying all the things they wanted to learn from us. How to eat/be healthy, how to deal with adolescent daughters, how to take care of minor cuts/burns, how to take temperature and blood pressure, exercising and the list goes on! I was in shock because most of these women are much older than me and probably have had more life experience than me and yet they wanted to learn so much from us. I felt so honored that they looked so highly at us at our young 20/21 years of being on this world and wanting us to share with them what we know. I looked at the other girls and we all had the same expression on our face, pure happiness in finding what God has sent us to do. This is why we all became nurses, we want to help people who are eager to learn and teach them well enough that they can go out and teach others so that our society as a whole is healthier and happier. I looked at their faces and saw the gears and motors already working and thinking about all the things we could do for these women. Within a minute of leaving the women we started talking about what had been on on all of our minds. We sat down with our professor, Dr. Belknap, and decided that rather than doing a ton of individual teaching projects that we kind of just made up on the fly, that we should do our teaching projects here with these women because they are so eager to learn! We also decided that we wanted to do our huge aggregate project, which makes up the majority of our grade, on this group because they would benefit from it most and maybe we can start to draw attention and popularity to the group so that it can become larger and stronger. Marianne and I kind of already told people at the places where we were planning on doing our teaching projects that we were going to present to them. So we said that we still wanted to do our original teaching projects but that we would work together on the First Aid topic for the women of Vaso de Leche. It is going to be a lot of work, but this is why I came here; I came to teach, to help those who need help, and to share my knowledge and love with the people of Piura. I only hope that I can make as huge of an impact on the people as they have already made on me in these past three days.