Author: kaelac040

Today was my last day at Curamericas! While I was pretty sad, I was also pretty busy finishing up the presentation on the Focused Strategic Assessment on Guatemala. That presentation has been a labor of love (and time) for the last seven days and I am very proud of what I have accomplished in my time here. I spent the first half of the day tweaking the presentation and writing notes for the script that I would be reading while I recorded. Then just before lunch, Andrew (the Executive Director) popped into the intern office space and said “let’s meet early for our daily meeting”. We all had a little chuckle at that, since the meeting was scheduled for noon but he popped in at 12:30! After the meeting I grabbed lunch and then sat down to try to record the presentation. That. Took. Forever.

I forgot how long and how difficult recording could be! Thankfully all of my notes both paper and electronic paid off and I finally got it all done by 4:30 (after starting around 2pm 🙁 )!

I’ve really enjoyed my time at Curamericas and I actually want to come back! There’s a nice Focused Strategic Assessment on Liberia that I never got around to…so who knows?

 

Today was my second to last day at Curamericas! The time is just flying by and I’m actually going to miss it a bit. However, I might come back in during July to volunteer a little bit more as there is so much that I still want to do but I just don’t have the time. Today Ms. Eason came and visited us for a bit during our daily meeting and then I had to write my Intern-Duction which is a short bio about why I choose Curamericas and who I am. After that I met with Andrew and presented my powerpoint on the work Curamericas did in Guatemala that I had spent yesterday working on. I was super nervous, but all of my one-on-one Art History presentations had prepared me for this. He was impressed and wants to put a recording of the presentation on the youtube channel :0 . But before that can happen I had some corrections, additions and changes to make before I make the video tomorrow. Tomorrow will be my last day 🙁 which will be pretty bittersweet but I’ll be glad that I don’t have to drive nearly an hour to work and back everyday. The commute is no joke!

On to my second week at Curamericas! Today I worked on translating all of my copious notes on the Focused Strategic Assessment on Guatemala Into a powerpoint presentation that will be eventually made into a video! While I was transcribing Casey was cataloging items which looked much more interesting, but the notes needs to be turned into something and that was my job. I had lunch a little late today, and I went to JuiceKeys! I had never been there before but Casey got a bowl from there last week and I’ve been intrigued with smoothie bowls ever since I had my first açaí bowl last Friday. I got a coffee flavored and somewhat chocolatey bowl that I really liked and spent my lunch break eating the bowl and working on my bullet journal which I use as my planner and have been putting my Curamericas assignments in. I managed to finish the powerpoint by the end of the day (yay!) and tomorrow I get to present it to Andrew so he can approve it before I move on to translating the presentation into yet another format (most likely video). Overall a rather uninteresting, but pretty chill day.

Finally it’s Friday! I can’t believe I got through my first week at Curamericas! A lot of interns and staff take Friday off, but not us 🙁 . Because of this the office was mostly empty today and I didn’t have a lot of work, so we were given an extended lunch time as there wasn’t much to do. Casey and I went back to Happy + Hale (where we went on Tuesday) but this time I tried something new. I had never had an açaí bowl before so I tried one today! It was really pretty and very tasty, I’m upset I never tried one until now! It was a mixture of berries, granola, chia seeds, bananas and honey!

    

After lunch I finished taking notes on the Focused Strategic Assessment I was working on, so next week I can start a new project. After I finished my work I still had some time left over I worked on my bullet journal and did some lettering. I only have 3 more days left at Curamericas and it’s been a pretty interesting experience so far. While most of what I do is research (this week it was on maternal care in Guatemala) I find the topics interesting and the reports are very detailed and informative which I love. Excited to see what reports I can dig into next week!

Today was a much more lighthearted and fun day at Curamericas! We had a group lunch at the office with all of the interns and staff (not everyone comes in M-F so it was my first time seeing some of them). During lunch we played Two Truths and a Lie, which somehow led to talking about scary bug and animal stories that we’ve experienced or heard of. I was having so much fun, I forgot to take a picture before some people left and the food was cleaned up [ 🙁 ]. Before and after lunch I tried to finish reading the Focused Strategic Assessment and taking notes and I almost finished today. I will most likely finish it tomorrow, which will allow me to move on to something different next week.

Since orientation yesterday was rather straightforward, today we jumped right into work. Poor Casey was assigned the task of translating the entire website into Spanish. I’ve never been so thankful I take Chinese! As for myself, I started my gradual comb through the Focused Strategic Assessment that Curamericas created to assess the work they did in Guatemala. It’s a very long and dense report so it’ll take me a while to finish. One of things that I found most interesting  was the section of the report that talked about Women’s Empowerment. The section laid out some of the factors that contribute to women’s empowerment and some of the factors that impeded women’s empowerment. When it comes to healthcare women’s empowerment is very important as so often decisions about their bodies and whether or not to seek care for themselves or for their children is determined by their husbands, but if they feel empowered to make their own health decisions, health outcomes for both women and children improve.

This picture is a chart I made in my notes that I was taking on the Women’s Empowerment section:

Today was my first day at Curamericas Global! Curamericas is a nonprofit organization working to save the lives of women and children in low-income countries around the world through improved health education and access to high-quality services. Since today was our first day, we mostly had orientation. We first met with the Executive Director Andrew Herrera to talk about the mission of Curamericas and why we chose to work there. Then I read through a bunch of orientation materials. After the pseudo-orientation we got to experience the daily team meeting where every member of the team who is working that day comes together for a big group meeting and discusses what they are currently working on and what they while be working on in the future. Andrew (everyone goes by their first name since its a small office) gives feedback and also talks about upcoming projects or events he needs people to work on. After the daily team meeting I started going through the youtube videos on the Curamericas channel and writing down comments for how I think some of the videos could be improved. After doing that for a little while Casey and I went to Happy + Hale to get lunch! It was hot outside but the food was good. After lunch we came back and I worked through some more videos. To close out the day I started working on my SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals for what I wanted to do and get out of this internship. All in all today was somewhat slow but I’m excited to see what happens tomorrow!

Oh! And I met Jack. He’s a cute little black and white dog (kind of loud when he meets new people). One of the volunteers brought him to hang out after lunch. It took a little while (and a lot of petting), but after getting to know me he calmed down a bit.