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Reflection:

     Mike and I heard Rev. Will Campbell speak about a service he held in the First Baptist Church in Dallas, TX. Will was a civil rights activist, an author, and a Baptist minister. He started his sermon there by saying something like this:

I’m going to tell you three facts today: the first is that 53 children will starve to death in the world during this hour we are worshipping, the second is that most of you do not give a shit, and the third is that you are more upset that I said ‘shit’ from the pulpit than that 53 children are dying of hunger.

     The sad thing is, he was right.

     Appearances… words… are more important than people and actions.

     The right argues that all the emphasis on political correctness is just stupid.

     The left argues that words have power.

     Both are true, and both ignore that the greatest power to be had is found in actions and seeing people as people, just like you see yourself. Movements have power.

     Mike and I were asked once, “When are y’all going to start your own church?” Jokingly we began imagining with our friends what that might look like, and Mike said, “If we do, we are going to call it the Assembly of PIGS… People into Giving a Shit… because the name itself will weed out so many who really don’t care about others.”

     Because Will was right.  Faiths and beliefs of all sorts start out as movements for doing good, actively struggling to be kind, addressing the needs of the oppressed or challenging those in power to seek peace and justice… but then those same powers get ahold of the faiths and start molding the belief systems into institutions.

     And institutions know how to nitpick in such a way as to never move again… the movement is gone and the minutiae hold court.

     In institutions it is easier to get offended by a preacher using a curse word from the pulpit, than getting offended that 53 children are starving to death. Why? Getting offended by the curse word means you can go home and eat that large Sunday dinner and complain about what he said. Getting offended by the children means that Sunday dinner might make you sick to your stomach and you will have to change your life… you will have to act… to move.

     Words do have power and sometimes the profane words will wake us out of our stupor to question the true profanities of our society…of our world. The hunger. The wars. The bigotry. The poverty. The hopelessness. The disease and death.

     But words are nothing without the movement to change those profanities. Nothing at all.

-Kathleen

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Here is a brief summary of what you helped the CDCA accomplish in 2020...

• COPROEXNIC, the organic agriculture cooperative, with our help exported 1,233,000 pounds of organic sesame (an increase of 61%) to three buyers!
• Together, we exported 717,288 pounds of organic peanuts to a single buyer... (a 10% increase).
• Together with El Porvenir, we exported 22,777 pounds of organic coffee (a 15% increase). All the above-mentioned exported crops were mostly grown in 2019 and early 2020.
• We, the CDCA, took over the selling of the organic coffee with the help of a Board member who set up the site FarmerShares.com.
• The sesame plant continues to undergo tremendous renovations to make it a world-class processing plant, employing 42 workers.
• We have held many virtual meetings with COPROEXNIC and buyers. One meeting enabled the co-op to buy equipment for the processing plant that will save money as well as water - from 2,000 gallons down to 300 liters for processing one ton of sesame.
• Much of our efforts in agriculture have been towards broadening the pool of financing for COPROEXNIC; and slowly, financing is getting better. They now have lines of credit for $1.3 million but still need a additional  $1.7 million, and they received a $45,000 grant to incorporate more women.
• Through the Vida Fund we lent out $111,621 in 2020.
• Vida Fund Loan payments and interest received in 2020 were $259,417, and investors were repaid $239,292.
• We received more than $100,000 in new Vida Fund investments.

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>   In the Nueva Vida Health Clinic, we continue to serve people, and while we charge a token fee (less than $1.50 towards exams, lab tests, and medications), we exonerate costs for about 30% of our patients due to their poverty.

>   Much of this year was spent creating our own PPE for our staff: gowns, hair coverings, masks, and face shields, and making sure they were all complying with the new hygiene rules. Every exam room is cleaned after each patient. Every morning and mid-day, every room is fumigated. Temperatures are taken of staff and patients when they arrive. All patients have to wear a mask and social distance.  We check in folks outside and take their vitals under tarps loaned to us by our local Rotary Club. Handwashing stations are set up at all outside gates and doors of the CDCA. We have done our very best to not spread COVID-19.

>   In the clinic, our two part-time physicians (general physician and pediatrician), and our full-time radiologist treated 12,284 patients.

>   After the pandemic starting hitting Nicaragua, we closed the clinic for one month, we closed healthy exams for three additional months, and exams for our chronic care patients (most at risk of death) for five months, and now have rescheduled healthy patient services on one day a week. This has greatly limited how many we can see. We send all suspected COVID cases directly to the Ministry of Health.

>   Our family planning program offers free, consistent birth control for 863 people including 31 males. We gave away 9,980 condoms, very important with Zika. Besides providing injectable and oral contraceptives, we also offer birth control implants and IUDs.  We put in 184 implants lasting three years and 15 IUDs.

>   Our radiologist performed 671 ultrasound exams on 552 patients after we received a donated, used ultrasound machine, which then broke the last week of 2020. We also did 288 EKGs.

>   We gave out treatment and medicines for 8,429 conditions and diseases and delivered 6-months-worth of anti-diabetic and anti-hypertensive medications to the patients’ homes.

>   We treated 140 patients monthly through our chronic care program (we lost three to COVID deaths). Besides their check-ups, lab work, and medication, they also attended monthly meetings to learn about diet, exercise, taking the medications properly, and giving each other support. Most have type 2 diabetes and /or hypertension.

>   We were fortunate to raise the first year of funding to hire our therapist, Dr. Soto, half-time. In October she started volunteering for two extra afternoons a week, because the need was so great. She saw 1,044 clients (half under 12 years old). She worked with them on 2,453 issues … from domestic violence, trauma and grief with COVID to behavioral issues. She also held tele-sessions when the clinic was closed in June.

>   Our laboratory completed 3,143 tests in the clinic for 1,030 patients. Most of our tests are blood tests done on an old machine whose reagents are no longer available. A new machine will cost $6,500 and we are trying to raise that now. We also do weekly-to-monthly glucose checks as well as urine tests as patients are checked in. We sent out 221 PAP tests and three biopsies to be read by a pathologist.

>   We continued our dental program with ORPHANetwork to see children in Nueva Vida from 24 community feeding centers across the western side of Nicaragua.

>   We have had 6 Nicaraguan medical and dental volunteers: three social workers, two nurses, and a dental assistant.

>   Our full-time dentist, hygienist, and dental assistant saw 4,168 patients (only 27% were under the age of 12 because the feeding centers were only open for four months in 2020). They performed 7,927 procedures.  Of those procedures: almost 44% were preventive care [cleanings, fluoride and sealants]; 28% were restorative care [fillings, etc.] and 12% were extractions… this is up from the previous years, because we began seeing more patients after the government closed its clinic in Ciudad Sandino, and there were fewer children getting consistent care through the feeding centers. We gave out 944 dental cleaning sets.

>  We gave out wheelchairs, canes, handicapped toilet seats, crutches, etc. to 72 patients.

>   Our one-morning-a-week eye correction clinic saw 415 patients and provided 448 pairs of glasses (12% were custom-made glasses).

>   Our community outreach and health education lost our paid health promoter to COVID-19 and failing kidneys. We have all grieved Jessenia Castillo’s death. We hired a social worker in October. With COVID we have had to limit greatly our outreach. For the first three months of 2020 we worked normally, but since then we have:

• Continued giving classes to new mothers and pregnant moms, but now one-on-one. After closing support groups for 4 months, we started up the two pre-teen / teen girls’ and the two pre-teen / teen boys’ groups which meet weekly, as well as the chronic care patients’ classes and the health promoter classes which meet monthly. All attendees have to wear masks and socially distance in our finished training facility!!
• Taught 126 different trainings for 2,453 participants.
• For the first quarter of 2020, we maintained the nebulizers and first aid kits in our 35 health promoters’ homes, helping 868 children and 877 adults with 2,856 acts of service. They with our general physician did 183 home visits.
• For the rest of 2020, our promoters still received a small thank you cash gift monthly even though they and our doctors could no longer move between homes with the fear of contagion.

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*   We hosted only two delegations all year…now three years in a row that we’ve been down from 13-14 delegations a year…and the 2020 delegations were much smaller. An additional delegation…all paid up…cancelled just as COVID hit. Thankfully they didn’t ask for their money back.  We had no medical or dental volunteers all year from outside Nicaragua.

*   We developed three social media fundraisers for Mother’s Day, Giving Tuesday, and the end of the year. We met our Giving Tuesday goal of $5,400 to move the clinic records from paper to digital, saving eight trees a year, limiting mistakes and freeing up time with the help of Hikma Health and their coding skills, also helping us find equipment and funding.

*    We did 28 presentations by ZOOM reaching people all over the world.

*    We funneled hurricane relief money to the Ministry of the Family and to farmers who lost their food crops.

*    We’ve continued to make many improvements to the Casa Ben Linder in Managua in order to house overnight guests and host events to raise the money needed to restore the murals and run a museum, remembering the fallen of the Nicaraguan wars and the benefits of the Revolution. With the lack of tourists because of the pandemic, this program is suffering like all other tourist-based businesses in Nicaragua; however, we did host 12 different events with 278 participants, and rented rooms for 272 nights.

*    Once each quarter we send out 15,000 newsletters with half going by email.

*    Our on-line recurring donations increased by 21%, up to 35% of the online total! This is critical with few to no delegations coming providing support.

*    Our number of donors increased by 6%. We continue to receive donations in euros and in pounds.

Amazingly, we finished 2020 in the black... thanks to you!

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