18 Jul No Rooms in the Honduran Inn

Every year for the past five years, Global Ministries has sponsored a medical team in Honduras. I’ve been part of each team as one of the support workers. This year’s trip, June 20-28, was phenomenal. Everybody gelled. We conducted clinics in five locations, and saw a total of 1945 patients.

The last clinic was in the town of La Flecha. We planned to stay overnight there, stay in San Pedro Sula the next night, and fly out on Saturday. But then we heard about a national strike scheduled to hit the country Friday morning.

Transportation workers–taxis, buses, truck drivers–were protesting the high cost of gasoline and government taxes on gas. The strike would start at 6 a.m. on Friday. This raised doubts about our ability to even get to San Pedro Sula. So we decided to try to beat the strike.

We drove from La Flecha for two-and-a-half hours, and arrived at the hotel in San Pedro Sula just after midnight. We had rooms reserved there for Friday night, but they had nothing available for Thursday night. Although there were no rooms in the inn, they did make room for us. They said we could sleep on the floor of the exercise room and lobby.

So that’s how we spent the rest of the night. I slept on a sofa in the lobby, using a sofa pillow. As people arrived to check in, I was right there.

The next night we slept in the rooms previously reserved. And Saturday morning, we flew home.

17 Jul 2008 Honduras Medical Team (Part 2)

Team leader Fonda Cassidy treating a patient.

On Tuesday, we told about the Global Ministries medical team that went to Honduras June 20-28. We treated all kinds of ailments. I thought you might be interested in some of the medical conditions we encountered.

• We saw a man who had been hit by a car. He’d never had his leg attended to, so it was ulcerated and gangrenous. Really, he needed to have it amputated. They had to tell them that. He said he would rather die than lose his leg–and he probably will, because it was bad.
• Everyone is treated for parasites. Children especially, as well as adults, had a lot of open sores that had become infected as a result of spider or mosquito bites. In other cases, parasites come in through open sores and create stomach aches or chronic diarrhea. So we do a lot of wound care–draining them, cleaning them out, applying an antibiotic ointment, and covering them. Sometimes there are so many sores we can’t cover them all, and we give anti-biotics to alleviate it.

• A lot of people are diabetic and don’t know it, so we did sugar screening.
• A 13-day-old baby girl was diagnosed as septic, her body full of infection with open sores. We took her to the hospital and paid for hospital care. We don’t know if she made it or not. And we wondered what kind of situation she came from to have that many open wounds and be in that condition. The very young mother probably didn’t know how to care for her.
• We saw an eight-year-old boy who, because of head lice, had itched his head to the point where open wounds developed, became infected and swollen, and just continued to fill up with more and more infection. Those all had to be opened and drained. The whole top of his head was covered with those.

We were able to treat many of the ailments we saw. But we couldn’t do follow-up, and that’s always a concern. We explained how to take care of a wound, or if they were diabetic, stressed the importance of going to a doctor regularly. But a lot of this depends on where they live, which might be 2-3 hours away from the nearest doctor. So how regularly they go is a real problem.