Barista Magazine

AUG-SEP 2015

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THE PEACE CORPS WORKS WITH MIGRANT COFFEE LABORERS THE MUNICIPALITIES AND DEPARTMENTS in northern Nicara- gua are permanent homes to many coffee producers, temporary homes to many migrant laborers, and the birthplace of a new project in coffee: HIV/AIDS training for mobile populations. Nishant Kishore was a Peace Corps volunteer stationed in northern Nic- aragua in 2012. With the support of the Ministry of Health, Nishant began to survey the behaviors, knowledge, and practices of the migrant laborers in his municipality as they related to HIV/AIDS, as well as other sexually transmitted diseases. The Peace Corps Nicaragua HIV committee wanted to expand the study by implementing it nationwide, and they successfully pitched the idea to PEPFAR (U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). The Peace Corps then began to recruit more volunteers to conduct the survey in all the coffee-growing regions of Nicaragua. Natalie Pritchett and Sara Dunbar, two more Peace Corps volunteers, designed the survey that was implemented for the nationwide investigation. A key ally was Marilyn Mora, the regional coordinator of VIH Mundo Rural Constuyendo Alianzas, who is an HIV expert working with mobile populations, and who helped the volunteers design the survey. Lucy Hernandez, 25; Allison Feuerstein, 24; and Joanna Alejandro, 25, have all been in charge of the project since July, and have been actively ana- lyzing the results of the survey and designing an intervention. When asked why they chose to focus on HIV/AIDS in particular, Lucy says, "Mobile populations, or groups of people who spend a significant period of time out- side of their homes due to work or other reasons, are considered an at-risk population for HIV infections due to their transient nature, making them a harder population to reach with services. As community health promot- ers, a main part of our Peace Corps project framework is to work with key populations and help provide education and access to preventative services with the help of Nicaraguan counterparts." Lucy shared some other studies that have been conducted with mi- grant-worker populations. "These studies have shown there is little knowledge about HIV/AIDS in general, but most of these investigations were done in other countries," she says. As far as the research team was aware, this was the first large-scale survey conducted with migrant cof- fee harvesters in Nicaragua. Researching this topic in the north of the country is especially relevant, as Nicaragua borders Honduras, which has the highest prevalence of HIV in Central America. Due to proximity, many Nicaraguans and Hondurans may be crossing the border to work at farms on the other side, Allison says, so transmission rates may be somewhat high. For this project, teams of both Nicaraguan medical professionals and Peace Corps volunteers conducted over 600 surveys at 32 different coffee farms throughout northern Nicaragua, in the departments of Jinotega, Matagalpa, Nueva Segovia, and Madriz. They were not able to interview people under 18, but they noted a lot of young people present on the farms, and wondered about the risk of HIV/AIDS in teenagers. "One of the bigger problems is that we were interviewing people who work all day," says Lucy. "It is hard to find a time to talk to them." And to keep track of them. "The idea is to give the survey every two years for about four or five rounds to see if knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors have changed," says Allison. "The important thing is to keep momentum up in the off years of the survey. That's when we plan to do our interventions." However, the volunteers are aware that even if they return to the same farms, the same workers might not be there, so it may be hard to make a correlation between the intervention program and a change in behavior. As their plan quickly becomes a 10-year proposed process, it's not just keeping track of the mobile farm workers that presents a problem: Peace Corps volunteers are a transient population themselves, turning over about every two years. The volunteers on the original team that start- ed the project (except for volunteer Joanna Alejandro) have since ended their two-year service, and Lucy and Allison will need to find replace- ments for themselves when their service comes to an end this coming year. "In a way, our role now is to slowly let go of the project and pass it on to new volunteers," says Lucy. As far as the results of the study are concerned, they found that only 20 percent of the participants had ever received any HIV education in the last year. This statistic became the foundation of the volunteers' in- tervention plan. As it has not been feasible to do any HIV/AIDS testing, the women are instead focusing on health education. They have trained teams of intervention specialists—half of whom are Nicaraguans—who have gone back to the farms they surveyed to work with the target pop- ulations. The specialists are continuing to lead educational sessions for groups of mobile coffee harvesters on topics of HIV/AIDS and other crit- ical sexual and reproductive health topics using informal techniques. After these preliminary sessions come to an end, the Peace Corps volun- teers also plan to lead HIV/AIDS awareness conferences for coffee man- agement and health-service personnel with the goal of familiarizing them with the topic and informing them of their migrant workers' vulnerability to HIV infection. They hope this serves to increase the willingness of farm owners to work with them in future cycles of surveys and interventions. The response from farm management so far has been positive, says Al- lison. "While many farm owners didn't seem to talk much about corporate social responsibility, they did see participation as a marketing opportunity," she says. According to Allison, farm owners seemed very proud of their certifications, and they knew this project could only help them comply bet- ter. Some farm owners made themselves more available than others, and some took a particular interest. One farm owner even reimbursed his staff for the time it took them to participate in the study. —Nora Burkey Editor's note: Through her nonprofit organization, The Chain Collabo- rative, whose mission is to facilitate collaboration among members of the coffee industry, and contribute to sustainable development in the coffee lands, as well as her work as a frequent contributor to Barista Magazine, Nora plans to keep track of the Peace Corps volunteers' progress as the project unfolds. Teams of Nicaraguan medical professionals and Peace Corps volunteers conducted over 600 surveys at 32 different coffee farms throughout northern Nicaragua in an effort to gather information about the practices of migrant laborers, as they relate to HIV/AIDS. 19 www.baristamagazine.com

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