Editor's Note: Andrea Lynch, who has been blogging from Brighton, England, since joining Rewire, will now be blogging from Managua, Nicaragua. This is her first post from Latin America, and we're glad her travels were safe. Our goal at Rewire is a mix of domestic and international postings that compare and contrast policies in the US and abroad, and the reality of how some of our policies affect the lives of people elsewhere. If you have ideas for coverage about either domestic or international issues, please contact us.

Greetings from Managua, Nicaragua—the gorgeous, chaotic, unpredictable, sweltering Central American city where this blogista will be composing her dispatches from now until April 2007. I arrived here on Thursday to begin a nine-month research collaboration with the feminist NGO Puntos de Encuentro (“Meeting Points” or “Common Ground” in Spanish) as part of my masters degree in Participation, Power, and Social Change (try explaining that one in a crowded bar in a language you’re still learning to speak). I’ve never been to Nicaragua before, and although I spent four years working for a U.S.-based international organization, this is my first time living in the developing world. It’s also my first opportunity to see, day to day, how people experience their sexual and reproductive lives in a context completely different from the one where I grew up; and my first chance to witness how current and historical U.S. policies shape daily realities in another country.

Just to get one thing clear right away: I didn’t come to Managua to “help” poor women or to bestow my enlightened American analysis on the masses. I came to make whatever contribution it makes the most sense for me to make, and much more than that, I came to learn: from a country of people who often survive more in a week than I could handle in a lifetime, and from a group of activists who do revolutionary work on sexual and reproductive rights in a context characterized by deepening fundamentalisms of all kinds.

Four days after landing, I’m still taking it all in. Between the damage wrought by the 1972 earthquake, the U.S.-backed Contra war that lasted throughout the 1980s, and the 1998 hurricane–not to mention the stresses associated with being the capital of the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere–Managuans are accustomed to chaos and improvisation as a way of life. There are no street names, only landmarks–the street with two telephones, the corner where the movie theater used to be. Addresses are the marriage of landmarks and directions–al lago (toward the lake) means north, al sur is to the south, arriba is east (where the sun comes up), and abajo is west (where it goes down). So, for example, I live in Managua’s Colonia Centroamerica, one block arriba from the triangulo, two lanes al sur, then halfway down the block. That’s what you write on a package you’re sending me, that’s what you tell a taxi driver if you want to go to my house. Guide books will declare that Managua has everything that’s bad about a city and nothing that’s good–but the way I see it, who needs street names when everyone already knows where everything is? That said, the lack of a reliable infrastructure, the widespread poverty and unemployment, and the uneven access to health, education, and other social services make Managua a challenging place to live for the two million Nicas who make their homes here.

A quick look at the sexual and reproductive health context in Nicaragua, though statistics only tell part of the story: out of a total population of 5.8 million, 42 percent of Nicaraguans are under the age of 15, and one in four women who give birth are adolescents. Pregnancy can be a dangerous endeavor: Nicaragua’s maternal mortality ratio is 239 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 190/100,000 for the rest of Latin America. Abortion is illegal under almost all circumstances (in 2003, the government and the Catholic hierarchy, both deeply hostile to reproductive rights, joined forces to attempt to deny a therapeutic abortion to a 9-year-old girl who had been raped in Costa Rica), and is a major contributor to maternal mortality. Contraception is legal but often unavailable or unaffordable, and although sterilization is legal for women over 35 for “emergency circumstances,” many doctors refuse to perform the procedure without a note of consent from the woman’s husband. As a result, Nicaragua has one of the highest birthrates in Latin America, with a total fertility rate of 3.8 children per women. Violence against women is also widespread—about a third of Nicaraguan women aged 15 to 49 have experienced violence of some kind, 31 percent while pregnant, and 97 percent at the hands of an intimate partner.

In this context, Puntos de Encuentro–the organization where I’ll be doing research for the next nine months–promotes equal rights and opportunities for all people through an approach that emphasizes “diversity with equity,” primarily through producing media for social change, strengthening local organizations’ and service providers’ capacity to approach their work from the perspective of gender and generational justice, and building alliances within Nicaraguan social movements. In the mid-1990s, Puntos began building a television studio from the ground up and staffing it with youth activists trained to be script writers, actors, directors, editors, and technicians. In early 2001, they launched Sexto Sentido (“Sixth Sense”), a social soap opera distributed on national Nicaraguan TV that seeks to deconstruct traditional attitudes and beliefs about power, gender, rights, and sexuality, proposing new ways of being and acting to its viewers through the triumphs, difficulties, and decisions of six young people. In its first season, Sexto Sentido took on the controversial topics of abortion, homosexuality, emergency contraception, rape, domestic violence, racism, homophobia, disability rights, substance use, single motherhood by choice, and youth sexuality–all the while presenting positive images of young people fully engaged as competent, capable decision-makers in every aspect of their lives. If you’re curious to learn more, click here to watch “Novela & Novela,” an English-language documentary about Sexto Sentido, or click here to watch “Real Life Stories,” a short video produced by Puntos about some of the challenges young people face in Nicaragua today.

In the coming months, I hope to use this space to share some of my own learning about what sexual and reproductive rights look like in another part of the world–an experience, to be sure, that will be filled with reality checks of all kinds.