Nicaragua
GHM in Nicaragua
The health promotion model that GHM helped launch in El Salvador spread to their neighbors in Nicaragua in 2017. Rev. Bishop Victoria Cortez of the Nicaraguan Lutheran Church had heard great news and excitement about improved lives in El Salvador, thanks to the faithful witness of Salvadoran Lutheran health promoters. Bishop Cortez reached out to both the church in El Salvador and to Global Health Ministries (GHM) to ask what it would take to bring this model to her country of Nicaragua. It took neighbors sharing ideas and what they had learned, with neighbors.
Pastor Concepcion Vanegas, the National Lutheran Health Coordinator from El Salvador, was accompanied by Rev. Tim Iverson (former GHM Executive Director) and Sandy Iverson (pediatric nurse practitioner) on a journey to Nicaragua to lead the initial training in First Aid and health promotion. Lutheran congregations spanning 11 villages sent 41 volunteers to be trained. The training was enthusiastically received, and the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health collaborated from the outset of this program, something that took years to accomplish in El Salvador. Today the training and service by village health workers continues to grow, with volunteers from Lutheran congregations serving as change agents for health and development.
Data from WHO, and The World Bank
Meet Soliette
Rev. Dr. Claudia Soliette Lopez Ortega believes children’s rights and Christmas parties go together. “It breaks my heart to hear stories about children who have never been invited to a birthday party because the neighbors know they are related to someone with HIV.” As a teenager she brought the issue of HIV prevention to the attention of the Bishop of the Nicaraguan Lutheran Church of Faith and Hope. The Bishop listened, and in subsequent years Soliette helped organize annual Christmas parties in the western city of Masaya for the Church, complete with visits from Santa Claus, for children often left out because of discrimination. Today she is an ordained pastor in that Church, and she continues to bring her heart for families and health to her work. Today she is organizing a grassroots effort to mobilize volunteer health promoters in her country.
