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.