This week, we gathered online for Stories of Hope from Nicaragua, an hour-long conversation with two people who have served their villages alongside AMOS for years. Nahum has been a brigadista (community health volunteer) in Rancho Pando, Chinandega for 25 years. Heidi has been a Community Health Volunteer for five years and now serves with the Pregnancy Club in Nejapa. Our Executive Director, Gabriella Woo, and the Development and Communications team, led by Lydia Caldera, joined them live.
We asked them what motivates them, what moment has stayed with them, and what has changed in their villages. Nahum and Heidi each answered in their own words, but they came back to the same idea: they serve with their hearts, and in doing so, they have discovered how much they matter to the people around them.
This is Heidi’s story.
A visit between friends
One day, Heidi went to see a pregnant neighbor. She wasn’t there as a Community Health Volunteer. She was there as a friend.
But when she arrived, she noticed things a friend might have missed. The young woman’s feet were swollen. She had a headache that wouldn’t go away. She was five months pregnant.
Heidi told her gently but clearly: this is not normal. These are danger signs.
Her friend hesitated. Her own mother had told her that swelling and headaches were just part of pregnancy. It’s a belief many women in rural Nicaragua grow up hearing.
Heidi didn’t let it go. She insisted until her friend agreed to go to the hospital. There, the doctors confirmed what Heidi had feared: she was on the verge of preeclampsia, a serious complication that can put the lives of both mother and baby at risk. She was admitted right away.
That visit changed more than one day. Now, when something doesn’t feel right, her friend doesn’t wait. She goes straight to the hospital.
After the baby was born, Heidi kept visiting. She showed the new mother how to care for the umbilical cord and checked in to make sure she had what she needed.
“That is the story that made me feel I was important to my community,” Heidi told us.
She is quick to say where her knowledge comes from: everything she recognized that day, she learned through her training with AMOS.
“Something deep inside told me it wasn’t normal”
Heidi knows how easily “it’s normal” can hide something serious, because she once heard those words herself.
After her own baby was born, she cried all the time. She didn’t want to look at her baby. Even the sound of the baby crying felt unbearable. Her husband said it was normal.
“But something deep inside told me it wasn’t,” she said.
It was postpartum depression. Heidi found her way through it with her family’s support and with the chance to finally say out loud what she was feeling. Lucía Padilla, a member of the AMOS staff who has been working with them since that time, stood beside her. “You’re not alone, Heidi,” Lucía told her. “We all get through this together.”
Turning her experience into care for others
What Heidi lived through became her reason to serve. The support Lucía once gave her is now the support she gives other women.
“I can’t keep what I lived to myself,” she said. “I have to share it with other mothers.”
Today, at the Pregnancy Club in Nejapa, she makes sure expectant mothers know the symptoms of postpartum depression, so no one has to wonder alone whether what they feel is “normal.” She also talks about how important skin-to-skin contact is when a baby is born, something she learned too late for her own birth.
“I didn’t know that was my right,” she said, “to ask the doctors and nurses to hold my baby after birth”.
A seed that keeps growing
Heidi’s story shows what happens when health education reaches the right people. Knowledge doesn’t stay in a training room. It travels into kitchens and living rooms, and into visits between friends. One woman learns the danger signs, and a friend gets to the hospital in time. One mother names what she went through, and dozens of others learn they aren’t alone.
At the end of our conversation, Heidi spoke directly to everyone who makes this work possible:
“This little grain of sand that you sow, I hope it keeps spreading.”
To everyone who supports AMOS: that grain of sand is yours too. Thank you for sowing it alongside Heidi, Nahum, and the many volunteers who carry what they learn home to their villages.
If you would like to support people like Heidi, become a monthly donor.