Day 14: Encounters...

On Saturday we woke up at 5 am and met up at the cathedral. Most of team "Impacto", composed of Maddy, Emily, Jerren, Peter, Greg and me took a bus to a rural village three hours away from Granada. The bus was completely full which made the ride a rather interesting experience. We struggled our way through the crowd of people to get out of the bus and walked to the nearby village to meet with the two women in charge of the campaign we were going to work at. We then took another van to Aguacate, the village where the campaign was about to take place.

Escuela Miguel L. at Aguacate

After setting up the table at the local school "Escuela Miguel L.", we split up into groups and walked around the village, some of us performing surveys in order to gain a better understanding of the community's needs, some of us distributing flayers to the people and explaining the goal of the campaign and the products we were selling. 

On that day, we had the different kinds of protective sun glasses and reading glasses as well as the solar-powered lamps and high-efficiency light bulbs for sell.

SEC products

While Maddy and I were walking around the village interviewing people and handing out flayers, we had some really great encounters with people from the village and got an even better sense of Nicaraguan's kindness and hospitality. People were for the most part very welcoming and open and answered our questions with a large smile. Very much like the two women in charge of the campaign who had welcomed us earlier and were now conducting the eye-exams with much patience and professionalism.

Our asesora's

A pretty good number of people came to the campaign and benefited from the free eye-exams. Some of them purchased glasses and thanks to Jerren's salesman talents and charisma we even sold one of the solar lamps!

Eye-exam performed by our asesora

While talking to the people from the village, we found out that most homes had electricity with relatively few amounts of power outages per week and that there actually wasn't a  very high demand for solar lamps. On the other hand, most families had at least one family member who was suffering from Presbyopia, a condition where the eye shows a progressively diminished ability to focus on near objects. The high efficiency light bulbs should have had more success but although people demonstrated some interest, they didn't actually make it to the campaign to buy them.

Regardless, we had a great first contact with the villagers from Aguacate and our somewhat miraculous sale of the solar lamp gave us hope for futures campaigns. 

SEC leader Santa with some people from team "Impacto"

Around 1 pm, after we had put everything back into place, a taxi picked us up and brought us to the bus station where we took a crowded van back to Granada. After the hour-long ride with little air, squeezed with three other people on the back seat of a van that contained double the amount of people it was supposed to, I made it back to the city. 

After all of us had rested during the afternoon, we met up again at a bar on La Calzada and watched the Basketball game... we go to Duke after all!