Another busy week

After trying to organize 50 people to go to two separate locations everyday last week, working with a group half that size, and sending everyone and everything to only one site, has seemed like cake. This week has been great, clinics went smoothly (over 1300 people attended our three clinic days), we were so kindly welcomed into each of the three communities where we worked, I had a running partner, and because clinics ran so efficiently, we had plenty of time for fun (swimming at one of our contact's farm homes, playing with kids at the orphanage in Choluteca, lots of soccer playing, etc.)

I've also come to the conclusion that I have the world's most non-traditional job, and most days that's pretty awesome.

Yesterday, my day went something like, go for a run, drink coffee, submit financial reports, travel with group of student volunteers to hospital, schmooze with hospital contacts, have news camera in my face for an interview, send group to tour hospital while I take care of some errands/logistical things, go to the banco central to buy coins for a project in the US where the guy working had to ask me a series of questions about my intentions for the use of the coins before he would hand them over (and we are talking the equivalent of $0.75 worth of coins.....), pick up scholarship applications for a bilingual school, swing by ATM, go to grocery store to buy juice boxes for kids at the orphanage, go to restaurant to pick up food for hospital staff who helped with the tour (while here waiting for carry-out order, meet with a journalist who wants information for a news article on the organization), return to hospital, distribute food to hospital staff, visit nicu to see a precious, month-old Honduran baby girl whose mother abandoned her (very seriously wanting to take this girl home with me or find someone here who could take care of her...), round up my crew of students to travel to orphanage where we delivere juice boxes, toothbrushes, toothpaste, crayons and coloring books, piñatas, and a three month supply of food...interview girl who completed high school with really good grades and is looking for a way to attend college, travel to San Lorenzo for drinks and appetizers at restaurant right on the water, power nap back in Pespire, dinner, play soccer, spend a couple of hours responding to work emails, play cards till 1am, and call it a day. Full day.

The other thing that's pretty awesome is that each day brings some kind of challenge, but every day is different, and while things rarely go according to plan, which can sometimes make things crazy and hectic and stressful, everything works itself out at the end of the day.

It's hard to believe it, but it's Saturday...beach day with my last group before I come home next week. Time here has gone so fast!

Further South...

The last two days with the group went well, making for an overall successful week, even after I felt like the world was going to implode last Sunday.

Wednesday, we visited the hospital in choluteca. I had been a few times, but only to pick up paperwork or to drop off donations...so I was aware of the conditions and lack of resources (public hospitals are severely underfunded), like lack of lights and running water in many of the restrooms, the total absence of soap or biohazard bins, and, of course, the lack of private rooms for patients (like the hospital I went to in chile when I felt like I was on the verge of death...there was a big open room lined with table-beds where patients sat only a few feet from one another, and doctors walk down the aisles between beds to listen to symptoms).

But I got a deeper look at what was happening inside the hospital as we toured, and even stopped to observe and help in, the OR, maternity wing, and men's and women's wards. We got to see a birth, a liver operation, and clean wounds. Until coming here, I never realized how severe ulcers can be, I've seen so many people walking around with half their leg eaten away, WHAT! I was also shocked by a lot of the things I saw and heard in the maternity ward, including the fact that post birth, they don't let the mother and child (apparently having the father in the hospital at the time of birth just isn't a thing here) stay in the hospital more than two hours after the baby is born. I think the nurse who was explaining this to me was getting annoyed, because I asked her to clarify/repeat this about 15 times...are you SURE you don't mean two DAYS? Not even overnight? So many things about seeing the birth were really pretty traumatic, but knowing the average age of women having their first child here is 15 (explaining why i get such weird looks when people find out im in my 20s and dont have kids...) and that, especially in rural areas, it's not unusual to fund a family with 5+ kids, it made me feel incredibly queezy.

On to more positive thoughts, we brought several boxes of donations to the hospital and painted one of the many areas of the hospital that has been left with no love (maintenance). Also, we discovered a steep and narrow stairway to the roof of the hospital, which at about 5 stories up, is the tallest building in the city of choluteca, making for a pretty cool view.

Thursday was our beach day, so it was nice to relax on the beach, cool off in the water, and kayak around the ocean after a full full week. We couldn't have asked for a better day!

We have a couple of days to get rested up and prepare for the next group, and then ill be on my way home before I know it...

TGIW

Ever have one of those days where nothing goes according to plan? We are working with a double group right now, which makes the coordination of two clinics every day extra hectic.

Day one, two of our four doctors cancelled somewhere around the hour of 4am, which made for a stressful start to the morning. Then one group arrived to the worksite without gloves. Then one group was two lunches short. Then, one of our drivers went to the airport to pick up one girl who arrived a day later than the rest of the group and then got stuck in a standstill on the highway for two hours because there was an accident, so I was stuck at our worksite with our tubs and suitcases of remaining medical supplies for three hours after I sent the rest of the group back to relax in the air conditioning in a packed to the max 15-passenger van.

All mini-catastrophes were resolved quickly and, for the most part, the students didn't even know these things were happening behind the scenes, so it all worked out, but it made for a hectic way to start off the week.

Day two went smoothly, except for one group getting a flat tire on the way to their worksite.

Day three was an adventure for my group. We worked on an island, so after a 45 minute drive, we had to load up all of our group members and security and medical staff onto a boat. We at least had some good scenery along the way, including views of Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In all, we held six medical clinics this week and saw somewhere in the neighborhood of 2500 people (exact count yet to come). It took a few sleepless nights and stressful days to get all 50-some people (including group members, doctors, dentists, police officers, etc.) and all of our supplies where they needed to be each day, but we got the job done. Also, it's WEDNESDAY!!!! Which means we are done with clinics this week, so now we will just be doing a hospital visit, a painting project, spending a day at the beach, and enjoying a little downtime.

Food Deliveries

"Downtime" between groups is a pretty misleading term, especially when some of these days involve waking up at 3:20am to leave the house by 3:45am and the day finally ends at 8:30pm. Not every day has been this busy, but it's far from downtime.

We have been working on a big food distribution project to benefit all of the students at so far more than 30 schools in southern Honduras. Kids Against Hunger, an organization in the US, donated a shipping container full of a vitamin fortified rice-soy "casserole," as they call it, for us to distribute to some of the areas poorest and most malnourished schools. We are up early every morning to load the car up with boxes and hit the road to deliver the boxes of food, explain the goal to the teachers, and teach teachers and parents in the community how to prepare the rice for the kids to eat at mealtime during the school day.

So far, the kids have loved it. We've noticed that the further "out into the sticks" we get, the bigger the smiles on the kids faces when they take the first bite of food. It's great to see that they like it and know that its so packed with nutrients, but it's also heartbreaking in that it makes me worry about the effects it has already had on their health when often the kids don't have anything to eat but a tortilla or a mango.

Note: Here, there are good mangos and there are bad mangos. "Bad" mangos are kind of the equivalent of crab apples, from everything I've gathered, only there is a twist...bad mangos, when they are not yet ripe, contain an acid that literally burns human skin. The first time I saw this around a child's mouth, I was afraid of what the mother was really trying to cover up by telling me her son was burned by mango milk (do I LOOK that gullible, lady?), but multiple reliable sources have since confirmed that, yes, that's actually a thing. Bad mangos really are bad mangos...

One of the mayors in a community explained to me that this time of year, the need for food for school kids is the greatest. Because we are in the midst of dry season and most families depend on agriculture-based work, many families are entirely out of work and can't afford to feed their kids. The mayor and several teachers described how the kids are in "good" circumstances if they are able to bring a tortilla to school as their food for the day. Not surprisingly, rates of anemia are high.

In other areas, teachers have commented that some students come to school specifically when there has been a food project in the area (the government has a program in place for school lunches, but it seems to only occur rather sporadically...), otherwise the kids are sent to work. So if nothing else, hopefully we are helping draw some more kids into schools.

We are delivering supplies to last 3 months at a time and plan to continue this at intervals throughout the year, so we can make sure that the food is being used as is intended and we can be in fairly regular communication with the schools and teachers. In some of the totally and completely inaccessible communities (and you'd be surprised at what we deem to be accessible...), a representative has come down with a horse or donkey to load the animal down with boxes and hike back to their school and the students.

Running in Tegus

Last weekend, Marvin said, "Hey, I heard about a road race in Tegucigalpa next weekend. It's 13 kilometers. How about you spend this week training, and then you can go run on Sunday..."

I was instantly in, though my exercise routine my first five weeks in Honduras has consisted entirely of using an old stairmaster, playing soccer, and doing yoga. There is really no "good" place to run here...the town is small and the highway can be pretty dangerous. And did I mention it's ridiculously hot?

They found me a running partner for the week though, and we did the best we could in terms of training. One day we took a loop around Pespire, twice we ran alongside the highway to the bridge shortly before Flores, and we took a trip running up the river washout to get to El Terrero.

Needless to say, I was totally not in shape to run an 8-mile road race, and i missed out on my typical pre-race oatmeal and peanut butter breakfast, but I did finish, and i did run the whole way. The race was in a very nice part of town, the area (finishing near Santa Lucia), being big on tourism, had great scenery.

The event was unorganized, not surprising, but cost the equivalent of $1 to sign up, justifying a splurge on a strawberry protein shake at the end to bring my weekend entertainment expenses to a total of $2.50 (that's the one thing I don't miss about being in New York right now...). There were somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 participants from various parts of Central America, aaaaand me.

There was no pre-race aerobic class, like the race I ran in Argentina last summer (well, it was winter there..ummmm, last June!), but it was still an experience. Volunteers handed out the infamous plastic water bags at various intervals; we ran along the highway, and they didn't stop traffic, so at times it felt like another warrior dash route (the dash we did a couple years ago in Minnesota had a car junk yard where you had to climb/jump over cars). The one thing that everyone neglected to tell me was that this was more than a road race, this was literally running 8 miles straight up a mountain! Overall though, it made for an adventure this weekend...and it's something I'd definitely check out again next year.

Lots and Lots of Dientes.

There's nothing like spending a week with dental hygienists that makes you want to floss quite so badly.

Last week, I worked with a group of volunteers that held 5 days of dental clinics to serve over 1400 kids. It was a busy week! The kids passed through stations where they received a toothbrush and learned how to brush their teeth, visited a dental hygienist to get their teeth cleaned, and then those who had serious issues were referred to a dentist for extractions. (Everyone also received a prize bag at the end).

The week a huge learning experience for me, because it was the first time I had ever really examined anyone's teeth besides my own. I never realized how lucky I am to have always owned a toothbrush and have grown up with regular dentist visits. It was heartbreaking to see young kids with so few teeth left, largely due to a high-sugar diet and lack of dental care -- a handful of kids we worked with mentioned that it was the first toothbrush they had owned, and for most, it was the first time their teeth had ever been cleaned!

It's pretty amazing how something so crucial that seems so routine to us back in the US can be so inaccessible here, but it was great to have a group here focusing on the needs of the kids for a full week.

Hammock man

This little man has far more talent (y paciencia) than I ever will!

La Laguna

Here is a place with a beautiful view, but the 40-some kids who live there have to trek an hour up a hilly, rocky, nearly impassable road to get to the nearest school. Most of the kids in this community also lack shoes. This fall, the organization started fundraising to build a school for the kids in this community, and yesterday we went to go check on the progress.

The community member supervising the project, Don Cristobal, told me:

"Education for the kids in our community has been a big struggle. They used to have to walk to the school in San Antonio de Padua, and for a long time we've been fighting to have a school for them in our own community. For a while we were holding classes on the ground in open spaces in the community here, but we we were still lacking classrooms so it was very difficult. As a community, we are so thankful that this project has begun. We can have our kids closer, in our own community, rather than sending them all the way to San Antonio. It would take the kids nearly an hour to walk there. There are 23 families that live in this community and about 40 kids who will attend this school when it is complete. Before, we were asking for help from politicians, mayors, but no one had the funds to help us build a school for our children until your organization helped us begin the project. The work here so far has been a great success, we will soon have our own school building. The materials for the school are brought from Tegucigalpa to San Antonio and the members of the community carry the building materials up the road to La Laguna and are helping to build the school. The community members are making a sacrifice to support this project, everyone is helping in some way. We still have a lot of work to do, but everyone in our community is ready to help, and we are very excited and thankful that someone listened and is helping us with what we have been fighting for. When we are finished, we will not have to send our kids on a long journey or have them sit outside every day to learn from their teacher."

Wow!

Poverty and Inequality in Choluteca

Today some stats were published in the local newspaper about the department (think State) of Choluteca, where I am living/working:

17% of the population has not finished primary school, 13% of those who should be attending grades 1-9 are not enrolled, 24% of residents lack electricity, 14% lack potable water, 21% have only a dirt floor, etc...

Another article was about how a hospital in Tegucigalpa has had patients waiting to receive urgent medical treatment since before Christmas because the hospital cannot afford to replace the machine to sterilize hospital equipment and other necessary infrastructure to treat patients.

Today, I also visited several schools where we will be working in the next two months, running medical and dental clinics and delivering nutrient-enhanced food donated by Kids Against Hunger. One school is looking for a way to put a ceramic tile floor in, and a teacher described another school that was in extreme need..there are no desks in the school so the students sit on the dirt floor.

Seeing the sites, hearing the stories, and reading the numbers makes the need here come alive and see how drastic inequalities exist-both between the US and Honduras and within Honduras itself. Fancy cars fly past people riding horseback or walking barefoot in dusty, worn out clothes traveling down the same highway. Right across the street from my spacious, air-conditioned home sits a stick house with a tarp for a roof...

Iguana for Sale

Earlier this week, I was sitting on the front porch eating a juicy slice of watermelon when a woman walks up to the gate, pulls a three-foot iguana out of her backpack, and tries to sell it for the equivalent of $2.00.

Iguanas are often used as human food here (meat, soup), but it's illegal because they are an endangered species...Thus the reason for carrying it in the backpack.

Beatriz paid for it so she could set it free, but it was pretty shaken up (I suppose I would be too had my limbs been tied together and I was shoved into a backpack and lugged around in 100-degree weather), so now it's being pampered here at the house, a new pet alongside the two dogs and thirty-some turtles here...add this to the list of things that won't happen to you in Iowa.

Clinics, Culture, and Containers...

The last week has been a blur. We had a university group here, and I had a lot of responsibility to take on with leading the group. At the end of the week, everyone came up with one word to describe what they experienced or what they learned or wanted to remember from the week...my word was teamwork.

In one week we held four medical clinics in three remote areas where the rural poor would have otherwise lacked access to general physicians, eye doctors, dentists, and pharmacies, we helped a total of 1235 Hondurans receive medical attention. (We had local doctors working with us and the volunteers were doing things like directing people to the pharmacy, taking blood pressure, etc.) We painted a school building. We distributed a trailer full of donated clothes and shoes. We held a cultural day in a community only accessible by driving 4x4s up a wash-out (not even a road) with no electricity or running water, where we played games, held competitions, danced, and played soccer at the elementary school. These things made the week incredibly successful, but any one person could not have accomplished any of it alone.

Another big accomplishment of the week is that I helped get information settled to open a self-sustaining pharmacy in a rural community. The idea is for a mayor or community leader to recommend someone to run the pharmacy. That person then receives training and an initial inventory. The pharmacy then sells the products at a 20% markup, so they are being paid for their time, but they are also, in a sense, providing a service to the community, and the community has reliable and affordable access to medicine. The base price goes toward restocking the pharmacy, leaving it self-sustaining. The pharmacy we were working on this week should be up and running in the next month or two.

The work continued after the group left yesterday. We have been chasing around a ginormous shipping container of nutrient-enhanced food that will be donated to 20 schools in southern Honduras to feed malnourished kids for the entire school year. Finally, after a month of chasing people around the southern half of the country to push paperwork, the container was released last night, and we unloaded a 40-foot truck full of boxes containing 270,000 bags of food that I will help distribute in the next month.

Life on the Carretera Panamericana

I arrived in Honduras Monday and was thankful see two familiar faces, along with a group of Hondurans employed by the organization, at the airport waiting for me. I was exhausted when I got in, but we went right to work, running errands while we were already in Tegucigalpa. 

Tegucigalpa is about two hours north of where I'm staying, and the weather was great, in the 70s when I arrived. The great temperatures, however, got my hopes up a little too high...In Pespire, temperatures are right at around 100 degrees during the day. When the sun goes down, it cools down to the 80s, but I'm still unbelievably thankful to sleep in an airconditioned room. 

The absolute essentials: sunscreen, bug spray, hand sanitizer, and water.

For the next few months, I am living with the two local coordinators for the organization who really seem to hold it all together. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, I've spent weeks at a time living in some pretty modest (i.e. no running water) areas in Central America, which makes my current home stand out like a luxury hotel, complete with a hammock on the front porch. We live right alongside the Panamerican Highway, which somehow is slightly comforting in that it connects me to so many places I've lived or visited in the last few years.

I have three new Honduran brothers, two dogs, two dozen pet turtles, and have been thrown into life with security guards and drivers, not to mention the 5 staff members of the restaurant next door that also take care of cleaning the house. Having a restaurant attached to the house is pretty awesome-- especially since the staff is very mindful in how they prep food so my stomach doesn't reject all Honduran food (at this point I'm unwilling to eat street food, I don't need that kind of a flashback to Mexico). And it still blows my mind how much better, fresher, and more natural food tastes outside of the US.

It's already become pretty obvious that things happen slowly here and that rules or plans will change with no rhyme or reason. Laws change, things fall through. You may have to show up at someone's office with small gifts to encourage necessary paperwork to get pushed through the bureaucracies of inefficient State processes. I had to go to three different cell phone stores until I could find someone who would cut a chip for me to use in my US phone. 

Key lesson this week: flexibility.