Fourth year Spanish major and political science honours student Erin Aylward is taking full advantage of the freedom that knowing another language brings.

The regional youth liaison for Oxfam Canada in Newfoundland, Ms. Aylward spent the summer in Central America, traveling and engaging in what she calls “ad-hoc volunteering” in Panama and Nicaragua.

“Two years ago I attended a women’s rights empowerment camp in Nicaragua. I was so incredibly inspired by the grassroots leaders I met that I decided to go back, to learn more about their initiatives, and to try and assist them in whatever ways I could,” said Ms. Aylward.

She began her summer with a stint working on a project with the United Nation’s Populations Fund in Panama’s mountainous Comarcaca Ngöbe-Bugle region, which is one of three autonomous Panamanian regions governed by an indigenous group.

While there she worked in a maternal house or “hospederia” with women experiencing high risk pregnancies and made a series of recommendations and reforms to the educational and health components of this project.

Next on her volunteering tour was Nicaragua where a friend’s mother had founded a women’s rights NGO staffed by a full time lawyer, psychiatrist, doctor, and social worker – all working on a volunteer basis.

While in Nicaragua Ms. Aylward was able to attend the 30th anniversary celebration of the 1979 revolution. She was an active participant in several gender workshops and was able to get a sense of how fair trade works by visiting a fair trade women’s coffee cooperative.

“Each member has to comply with certain environmental and labour standards, while also investing a certain amount of their profit back into their community,” she explained.

The result? “Women in an alarmingly sexist region were able to empower themselves, protect the environment and invest in their families and communities. It was incredibly empowering and inspiring.”

Ms. Aylward also visited the site of a mine owned by a Canadian company and was horrified by the conditions that have resulted in the nearby town as a result of the company’s presence.

Potable water is extremely limited since the mining company has contaminated the aquifer. And while the mine may have contributed somewhat to the economic development of a very impoverished region, it has come at a very heavy human and environmental cost.

“Just walking around you won’t find a single man over 55 or 60 tops … they have all died young due to kidney failure and lung disease from working in the mine.”

Ms. Aylward is taking what she has learned about the complex world of international development (“we have to be strategic about it”) and trying to transmit it into effective action and results.

As a result of the trip she created a database of women’s rights funding sources for small scale NGOs that is being circulated across Nicaragua. Building on her contacts and experiences with Oxfam, she earlier founded the Global Education Initiative whose mandate is to promote education related to global issues and social justice in the provincial school system and at Memorial University.

Her travels and volunteering have helped open her eyes to the rest of the world and to the importance of taking action locally.

“In Newfoundland we can sometimes emphasize our own culture and heritage to such an extent that I think we forget about the horrifying realities of other parts of the world, and our responsibility to take action. Some new arrivals in our own province have grown up in refugee camps and fled civil wars and it is up to ourselves and to our education system to try and promote awareness and change.”

She makes a smart analogy in terms of the seal hunt – “if we want to understand the European Union’s ban on the seal hunt we need to understand what the European Union is.”

Ms. Aylward’s full immersion in the Spanish language this summer “was a bit of a wake up call after being in a classroom for so long but being able to communicate directly with the people I was working with was an invaluable cultural experience.”

She hopes to put her Spanish skills to work in a future career aimed at international development.