Alea, Catherine & Jordan: GROW Internship in Piura, Peru

To our fellow GlobeMedders (and whoever else stumbled upon our snippet), hello!

This is Alea, Catherine, & Jordan, aka your 2019 GROW Team. It’s been two months since the first day of our internship in Piura, Peru, but our determination and enthusiasm for the 2019-2020 semester continues to grow (get it?). For more information on the GROW Internship, our partnership with CHOICE Humanitarian, and our specific adventure this summer, please read on!

First, here’s a bit of background on GROW and the internship. Every year, GlobeMed chapters across the country choose anywhere from 2-8 students to participate in an international internship with their partner organization. Each year, we direct funds from our campus-wide campaigns to a specific non-profit “partner,” and each NGO then takes full control over the utilization of said funding. The GROW internship aspires to strengthen communication and facilitate cross-cultural understanding between GlobeMed students, NGO staff, and most importantly, members of affected communities.

GlobeMed at UPenn has been partnered with CHOICE Humanitarian Peru for three years. CHOICE itself is a large network of non-profits headquartered in the US, with chapters in Kenya, Guatemala and Nepal in addition to Peru. Each chapter of CHOICE follows similar methods of international development but largely functions autonomously within various areas of focus. CHOICE Peru operates in four fields – Health & Nutrition, Agronomy, Tourism, and Environmental Awareness – with the specific intention of stimulating economic development within the Piura province of Peru.

Piura, both the city and province, is located on the northwestern coast of Peru, incredibly close to the equator. As we quickly learned, the climate is both extremely hot and dry, with most of the region falling under a desert landscape. We spent almost every day of internship traveling to “La Arena” (“The Sand”) region and quickly became acquainted with its wonderful inhabitants, as well as the debilitating issues posed by the geography of their home.

From May 20th to June 7th, we wholeheartedly committed to learning from and volunteering under our CHOICE mentors. Each day we explored a new region within Piura, concentrating our efforts within the La Arena villages. At times we contributed physical labor to projects within the fields of Agronomy and Environmental Awareness. This work ranged from planting trees within a sand-filled, 100 F degree schoolyard, to clearing plots to construct “biohuertos,” small vegetable gardens. However, we discovered our primary strength to be in education. For example, we helped CHOICE nurses prepare lessons within the field of Health & Nutrition, especially those directed towards new mothers and their young children. We also collaborated with CHOICE Tourism staff to lead English lessons among school children in a La Arena library.

Without a doubt, we derived an indescribable sense of accomplishment from our lessons in the Santa Elena library. These moments of watching curious children run to the library, excitedly asking for spellings and writing new words in their notebook just to remember them, underline the purpose of our trip. Throughout the internship, we consistently engaged in dialogue debating the long-term impact of our efforts and asked ourselves … How could we justify our presence here? How would we ensure our internship did not truly end once we left Peru? Entering and involving ourselves within communities certainly helped answer these questions. You can read and theorize about the struggles faced by these communities, but it is only through first-hand experiences that one can contrive any real sense of how to help.

We left Peru with a deep understanding of structural issues within Piura, especially waste management, agronomic instability, and insufficient nutrition resulting from the former. In one month, we will return to GROW, both with exciting information regarding projects at CHOICE and possibilities regarding GlobeMed’s involvement. More than anything, we incredibly grateful to have met the faces of CHOICE and the communities in which they work.

Thank you so so so much, fellow GlobeMedders.

With love, your 2019 GROW Team!