Necessary Introductions

Hello and welcome to my blog! I'm Sami, a soon-to-be junior at Johns Hopkins University and current intern at Mano a Mano International Partners. I'm starting this blog for a couple of reasons: 1) to share my experience as I travel with Mano a Mano to Bolivia; 2) to keep track of it for myself - like a diary, but with embedded pictures; and 3) just to talk! This first post is just to give all of you lovely readers (even if there are only a few of you...) an introduction into Mano a Mano. It's an amazing organization that I want the entire world to know about - and I'll try to keep it short and sweet, don't worry.

Mano a Mano

Our logo!

Here are the basics: Mano a Mano was founded in 1994 by these two seriously amazing people: 

Joan and Segundo! Aren't they cute?

Joan was a Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Bolivia, where she met Segundo, whose family lived in a rural Quechua community there. When Joan came back to the States, she brought Segundo with her, and they got married! Segundo was working for Northwest Airlines, which allowed him to make frequent trips back to visit his family in Bolivia. One of his brothers was working at a severely under-resourced clinic, and Segundo always brought him medical supplies that he collected here in the Twin Cities. Joan and Segundo are some of the most personable people you could ever meet (one of the first days I was working in the office, we had freshly-baked cookies from Joan!), and the response they began getting from locals was overwhelming. Bolivia is the second-poorest country in the western hemisphere (behind Haiti - and if you want to read about some cool stuff happening there, check out my friend Brittany's blog), so the supplies were always accepted with gratitude. Thus, Joan and Segundo decided to found Mano a Mano so that they could ship more supplies as a non-profit organization. Since then, Mano a Mano has shipped over 4 million pounds of medical supplies! What's even more impressive is that all of these supplies were otherwise headed to landfills - so, not only are we providing critical and often literally life-saving equipment in Bolivia, but we're also eliminating a huge chunk of waste in Minnesota! Definitely a win-win.

These wheelchairs arrived in Bolivia with our last shipment.

So, as if that weren't impressive enough, Mano a Mano has expanded at a phenomenal rate since its founding. We now construct clinics and schools in rural areas, provide training to the medical professionals and teachers who staff them, build clean housing and sanitation infrastructure for these professionals and the community, construct roads and runways, manage an aviation program with four of our own planes (and our own hangar) that provides transportation for patients in need of inaccessible emergency care, and build water reservoirs to allow farmers to water their crops year-round. All in all, we have over 300 Mano a Mano projects in Bolivia, and none have failed. We work with local leaders, municipal leaders, community members, and anyone else applicable to ensure that the projects will succeed.

This is an adorable little Bolivian baby getting a check-up in one of the Mano a Mano clinics!

Here's a tiny little baby being flown to a bigger hospital in one of Bolivia's larger cities - and check out how cool our planes are! 

This cutie is showing her appreciation for a book donated by a local Minnesota school and delivered by Mano a Mano volunteers - she'll probably read it at her brand new school!

Celebrating the flowing water and the promise it brings to these communities

Every year, Medtronic uses the month of June to emphasize volunteering and giving back to the community. This year, they partnered with Mano a Mano to give their employees the opportunity to take some time off from their normal work and to spend it volunteering with us!

These are some volunteers from Medtronic's philanthropy team. They helped us sort and pack medical supplies for shipment, start a garden for our office space, and package school supplies!

For three weeks in June, Dana (our awesome Office Manager) and I were working at different Medtronic locations around the Twin Cities so that volunteers could help out without leaving the building! Here, they're making school supplies packets we send to the kiddos in Bolivia. And one of the best parts of those three weeks was the Medtronic cafeterias. Bonus: their catering is done by Bon Appetit - yep, the same people coming to Hopkins next year! 

Off to Cochabamba

So, other than helping out with the Medtronic activities, I've had a lot to do at the Mano a Mano office! I've been working on creating some databases to manage our grant application history, keeping track of donations we receive, doing some general office management, and hanging out with my friend Tigresa!

Tigresa is Dana's dog - she was adopted from Panama and is now our unofficial office mascot! Here, she's showing off some of the Bolivia-made crafts we sell.

Okay, so now to the actual purpose of this blog: my trip to Bolivia. I'm flying to Cochabamba on August 2nd and will be there for two weeks! The first week will be spent touring the Mano a Mano headquarters, checking out the new agricultural demonstration center to train rural farmers, sightseeing in the city, and adjusting to the altitude (11,000 feet above sea level - yikes!). For at least the first week, I'll be working with a group of students from Oxford University (yes, the one in England) who are going to the demonstration center to build a couple cisterns and do some other construction stuff there. I'm hopefully also going to get the chance to travel to some of the projects in the more rural areas - I want to meet some cute kids! 

Anyway, thanks for checking this out. Stay tuned for more info on travel logistics and all the reasons I'm terrified to go to Bolivia by myself (wow - that doesn't actually sound all that fun to read... I'll throw in some jokes or something, don't worry)!