Adelante Mujer/Woman Advance, an organization based in Fond du Lac, provides funding for basic expenses for Nicaraguan women who are in medical school. (Submitted photo)
JAY SORGI
SPECIAL TO THE CATHOLIC HERALD
“I have to be a doctor. I have to do it for my mother,” said Sayonara on a painful day about 10 years ago.
She had just buried her 43-year-old mother the day before, after her mom died of pancreatitis. Only 3.8 percent of U.S. citizens die of that disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.
But in a nation like Nicaragua, which the International Monetary Fund says has a per capita gross domestic product 30 times less than the United States, where many homes and hospitals don’t even have roofs, top-flight lifesaving medical care by women and for women is needed.
“I have to do it to help women like my mother,” Sayonara said to Sr. Diane Bauknecht, C.S.A., that day near Nicaragua’s eastern coast, where the Miskitu indigenous people mainly live.
Sr. Bauknecht and her Fond du Lac-based organization, Adelante Mujer/Woman Advance, chose to empower Sayonara by funding her education; she is among 89 Nicaraguan female medical students they have helped send to medical school since the organization began in 2009.
“I’m not sending this money so that you become doctors. I’m sending you this money so you become excellent doctors. Your people deserve it,” Adelante Mujer Founder Sr. Ann McKean, C.S.A., would tell those students, according to Sr. Bauknecht.
“The people we serve in Nicaragua are even poorer than some of the people who live in the city,” Sr. Bauknecht added.
“Many of the women who we work with are getting by, living in what we would consider almost like a slum-type living environment. Many of them have no furniture. Sometimes they sleep on cots or even on the ground. They have little access to food during the day. They don’t serve food at school. So many of these women don’t eat outside of their homes.”
Sr. Bauknecht added that the 60 female medical students they help now have no poverty of passion to do God’s work as healers in the field.
“They do not have computers. They literally study on their cell phones. Or they’ll go to the library and make photocopies. There’s usually one or two textbooks in the library, so they’ll make photocopies of that, and take it home and read at night,” she said. “These are indigenous women who are passionate about going to college and who want to graduate and make a difference.”
The Nicaraguan government covers the cost of tuition for medical school, but it doesn’t cover the cost of the meager basics. That’s where Adelante Mujer comes in, paying for five years of the six-year pathway.
“We supplement that woman’s livelihood so she can afford to go to school,” Adelante Mujer Executive Director Kaitlyn Boscaljon said.
“Without our funds, many of these women wouldn’t have access to go to college, let alone become medical doctors.”
Boscaljon said the $1,650 per year that they provide offers rent, clothing, supplies, transportation and the technology students need.
“So while they may be able to go to school,” she said, “they would not have any ability to work or live without our funding and support.”
That investment, Boscaljon said, brings a dividend that not only affects the medical students themselves, but it helps heal their part of one of the poorest regions of their nation.
“It’s absolutely incredible,” Boscaljon said, “the ripple effect of the work. It changes not only one woman’s life, it changes her entire future, her future family, and it changes her community. Every person that she touches, every person that she sees, is now changed in a way that creates lasting, lasting change in a region that’s very, very, very poor.”
According to both Boscaljon and Sr. Bauknecht, they accept women into the program in their second year of medical school, but they don’t choose anyone until they know the student’s education will be fully funded.
“Last semester, I had to turn away students, and that was like extremely painful (for) women who are seeking the opportunity for higher education in a country where there will be no other avenue for them to receive that education without support from someone like Adelante Mujer,” said Boscaljon.
“We want to be able to help as many women as possible.”
That doesn’t just mean forming women doctors in Nicaragua, and it’s within their plans to expand their reach to help women become doctors in Guatemala. That means helping women like Sayonara’s mother who might have survived if she would have received either preventative or responsive medical care, even in hard conditions.
“These women are being trained to do almost like field medical care. That can be lifesaving care, certainly life-changing,” said Boscaljon.
“All of that work fosters social justice, supports sustainable development, and more than that, it just promotes dignity for all people. And when we offer dignity into the world, the ripple effect of that is tenfold,” she added.
“That’s the work of the Church.”
To donate to Adelante Mujer’s mission, visit https://www.womanadvance.com/donate.
