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.