Along the Rio Grande.
Most days since I have started this internship I come in and get right to working on the tasks that have been assigned to me. I will be in the office I have been assigned looking over numbers, notes, and research on the computer for hours. The first task that was given to me was to analyze some data that came from a conference that Native Strong has recently held. Reading through numerous documents often can seem like it is tedious work in most cases. However, doing this work for the Native Strong program here at the Notah Begay III Foundation (NB3) is far from tedious. The reason being that every person responding to the documents Native Strong is putting out is apart of a wider network working to build a data set to provide information to help understand the status of the health of Native American children.
Looking east from the NB3 Offices.
Evidence of this extended network that Native Strong has was a site visit that took place last week that I got a chance to participate in. The site visit was just down the road from the NB3 offices at Santa Ana Pueblo. While there at Santa Ana we got to see the kind of activities that were happening that particular day. That day the children happened to be participating in some Cross-Fit classes. It was exciting to see the children so happy and energetic in this class. While watching the children having fun in their Cross-Fit class I could not help but realize that a great deal of that was made possible because of NB3’s Native Strong program. Santa Ana was a recipient of one of Native Strong’s Capacity Building Grants that is aimed at supporting planning and health assessments in the community to gather and analyze data that will help in creating childhood obesity prevention strategies. After participating in the site visit I was motivated to keep working on the tasks I’ve been giving throughout this internship knowing that in someway and form the work I’m doing is going to help the Native American children.
