World Partners Fellows Profiles
The 2008-2009 World Partners Fellows recently returned from El Salvador and Nicaragua, where they volunteered with an array of grassroots organizations working to empower poor and marginalized populations and fight poverty. The fellows' journeys took them to corn fields and sweatshops, rural villages and urban slums. Together, their narratives document the power of grassroots development—how much can be accomplished when local people collaborate to effect change in their communities.
Read more about their experiences below.
Natasha Wilder
During the year I spent with IMU I worked with rural women's associations in the regions of Chalchuapa, Ahuachapán and Suchitoto. I facilitated trainings on stress reduction and conflict management, and assisted IMU staff while they coached women to run their own meetings and manage the finances of their communal micro-enterprise projects. In each community I visited, the wounds from the civil war still ached in the collective consciousness. More 
Sarah Fink
As a volunteer, I was asked to devise a way to involve the local youth in FUDEGL’s agricultural projects. My task was to establish youth groups in these communities, a previously unknown concept, and create agricultural projects that the youth themselves would implement. More
Julia Kaminsky
What had started out that morning as a faint sketch on an otherwise unremarkable wall was now colorfully taking form as a mural of a crane encroaching upon a lush landscape. A steady stream of people had been arriving since the morning—on foot, on bicycles, in the back of a rusting red pickup—all eager to take up brushes and declare their opposition to gold mining in their town. More
Tamara Milsztajn
Every weekend, sweatshop workers come to ORMUSA to learn about their rights and how to advocate for them. Listening to their stories of abuses, I learned about gross labor violations taking place around the country. The words "made in El Salvador" would never again be just a label on a T-shirt for me. More
Rachel Dizard
I began to ponder what it means to experience life, on a year-in and year-out basis, without any semblance of control over your surroundings. For that was what life appeared to be like for the vast majority of Salvadorans I encountered. More
Emily Schechter
This was my first focus group with Pro Mujer Nicaragua, a women’s microfinance and health NGO. I was eager to find out what Nicaraguan women thought about gender roles, and this woman’s comments quickly revealed my naïveté. I realized that there was a long road ahead in the process of changing gender attitudes and achieving women’s equality. More
Elsita Kiekebusch
Our objective was simple—we intended to cultivate and breed native corn varieties using sustainable agricultural techniques, trying to reverse soil degradation and increase food security for local farmers. Yet because of the ubiquity of laboratory-bred hybrid corn, much of the local knowledge about environmentally friendly native corn varieties has been lost, making our task daunting. More
Benjamin Meyer
My job was to record and transcribe interviews about the experiences of survivors. Those I interviewed were often visibly shaken and sometimes cried profusely when recounting their experiences, but they also expressed a certain amount of relief at the end of our interviews. Despite all of the suffering the experienced, they consider it crucial that their stories be told. More
