Marta Alicia Zúniga, Facilitator
Martha Alicia Zúniga (second from the right) waves Camino Verde flags withbrigadistas from her community.
In the year 2004, SEPA came into my life, as a means to serve others. It was a new challenge: to free ourselves from dengue, which was harming us so much. In the household-to-household interaction, I had the chance to share knowledge and also learn from each household, socialising our needs and looking for the best solutions in solidarity, to the point of coming to feel that we are part of a large family, in which my daughters have become involved along with my grandson, who participated with us at his young age…
This year, I’m facilitating the SEPA approach in another neighbourhood. They are youth between 13 to 18 years of age, who are contributing to their community. We have managed to involve the leaders, and to get them to commit themselves more to support the work the brigade carries out in households. Adults and children are putting their knowledge to work at home, and we have seen the results through the activities that we undertake with each group.
According to data from the monitoring activities carried out in November, positivity has decreased from 17% to 12%, which is encouraging and makes us committed to improving our work to involve more community members in the SEPA brigade. Thirty neighbourhoods have declared war on dengue and in the near future we’ll be able to be free of it in Nicaragua.