Meet Ivett, Our Newest Team Member
My name is Ivett Ramírez and I am excited to introduce myself to you as the newest member of the Brigade's Honduras team! I am just finishing my master’s degree in public health and am passionate about making a difference in people’s lives, so I feel lucky to find a job doing what I love.
Since I came aboard in April, I have been working with the team on the annual impact evaluation to help shift the Brigade's health services and training more toward data-driven, evidence-based approaches. This is a major project and I am happy to report that it has been going well!
When the team initiated this effort in May, two clear objectives were set: determining the empirical level of poverty and health of the families we serve and understanding the perceived needs, or main concerns, of the community. Subsequently, we faced two challenges. The first one involved formulating clear and easily understandable questions for respondents, ensuring that any literacy issues would not hinder the accuracy of our findings.
Once we had the questions down, we then needed to tackle how to go about collecting the information! As you know, the communities served by the Brigade are spread across the mountains and are not always easy to reach. Homes are spaced far apart and often hours away from the nearest paved road. We needed to visit over 500 homes to conduct interviews, so finding volunteers (preferably ones up for ALOT of walking) was our next step. Fortunately, we were able to recruit 20 high school students from La Paz who were studying nutrition and community health!
After training our volunteers and making arrangements to ensure everyone's safety as they traveled, we worked with community leaders to map out a path to every home in each community. With the help of software, we were able to collect data on phones and create a GPS mapping of the households that are benefiting from the Brigade's projects.
This work was definitely a challenge for the team, the students, and all of the volunteers because to get to a house we had to walk a lot, and it exhausted us. But when we got there, empathy for the needs of the families and team solidarity helped refresh us. It took us approximately two weeks, but we visited all 558 homes!
I can say that the experience has had a great impact on me because I could see with my own eyes the great need that exists in every home, and how day-by-day the parents are working under the sun to have enough food. I admired the willingness of everyone we spoke with to help us through this process without complaining or refusing – this reflects the value they see in the work that the Brigade does.
We have just started analyzing the data, but I already feel this assessment will be a success thanks to the support of the students, volunteers, and leaders, as well as people from the communities who collaborated to make it happen. I look forward to sharing the results and want to extend heartfelt appreciation on behalf of the families we visited for your invaluable support!
