About MMA

Missoula Medical Aid is unusual in the world of medical missions—our sponsor and volunteer base is primarily local, which makes the tie between Missoula, Montana and our Honduran home communities intimate.
We started our work meeting the Hurricane Mitch emergency in 1998, but our strong relationship with Save the Children—Honduras—and with regional Honduran hospitals and service clubs—has continued and deepened, and made our clinics only a part of a big-picture community health improvement plan.

In a typical year Missoula Medical Aid sends 40 and 60 medical volunteers and interpreters who work in regional Honduran hospitals or set up day clinics in rural schoolhouses. Working alongside our Honduran partners, these volunteers:

• provide basic health and dental exams for approximately 6,000 people, and follow-up care for our more seriously ill patients;
• conduct approximately 300 women’s health consults and cervical cancer screenings;
• distribute tens of thousands of vitamins, hundreds of pairs of eyeglasses, and year-long fluoride treatment for 2800 school children;
• do various gynecological and orthopedic consults, procedures, and surgeries.

In addition to increasing Hondurans’ access to health care, we work with Save the Children and local Honduran service clubs on special projects that improve long-term community health.
These projects include:

• helping people build stoves with chimneys so that fewer families cook on open fires inside the home, where smoke causes respiratory and eye problems:
• the construction of ecological coffee processing stations so that fewer small farmers process coffee in the local creek, polluting the neighborhood surface water;
• developing model farms so neighbors can learn how to grow a wider variety of crops to improve family nutrition, learn how to use one plant to serve as pest repellent for another, and learn techniques that slow erosion and build soil fertility.

A Hurricane called Mitch: The Birth of Missoula Medical Aid

In Octover of 1998, Hurricane Mitch, the most deadly storm to hit the Americas in two centuries, devasted much of Honduras. Torrential floods and mud slides killed more than 8,000 people, and left hundreds of thousands homeless and in need of immedaite medical care.

Employees of Nightingale Nursing in Missoula read about Hurricane Mitch and went into action. They immediately organized and sent four medical adn rebuilding brigades over the course of the next four months.

Since that time, Missoula Medical Aid (MMA), a 501 c 3 non-profit corporation, has sent two to three medical teams a year to provide basic and advanced medical care for thousands of needy Hondurans.

Our Mission:

Missoula Medical Aid works with rural and impoverished communities in Honduras as they seek to improve health and access to health care.

Our Vision

MMA envisions healthy, self-sustaining Honduran communities in which adequate nutrition, potable water, safe home environments, and medical care is accessible to all.

Our Values

• We believe in providing medical treatment for those with immediate health problems and helping to develop and fund programs that begin to alleviate health problems at their root cause.
• We believe in addressing all of the basic components that affect health, including nutrition, agriculture, environment, education and more.
• We believe that it is the right thing to lend a hand to people who live so close to the edge that a slight medical problem can send them tumbling.
• We believe that those with resources and medical talent should use them to help where both are scarce.

Missoula Medical aid is a 501 c 3 non-profit corporation.