Medical Teams

Our Medical Teams—averaging 12-15 medical professionals and interpreters—travel to Orocuina and San Lorenzo, Honduras, or La Esperanza, Honduras. Each volunteer carries two 50 pound suitcases full of medicine and supplies. We sleep on cots in homes or in the local Save the Children office, and each day we travel by pick up trucks over rough roads to remote villages to set up our day clinics.

Our hosts will have spread the word that we will be visiting, and more than two hundred people may be lined up when we arrive. We arrange tables in a tiny church or school and unpack our supplies. Separate spaces are set up for primary care, dental exams and for women’s health consults and cervical cancer screenings.

People are seen in family groups with our interpreters working hard to understand medical histories and explain medications. At the same time, our medical staff listens to lungs and hearts, peer into eyes and ears and mouths. Many families are fairly healthy, although they may commonly have sings of malnutrition, respiratory illness, diarrhea and parasites. Each day we find several patients who need referrals to a national public hospital, so we arrange with our Save the Children partners to help coordinate their care.

Often we bring specialists, too, and help staff regional public hospitals. We do regular orthopedic and OB-GYN visits, and so repair tendons and joints and broken bones, deliver babies and do a variety of gynecological surgeries.

But our teams do more than medical work. We’ve given toys and presents to a riot of children on Día de los Santos in the broken school house in La Puente; we’ve run down the highway at night to help victims of a car accident, only to find the victim was a cow. We’ve chased rats or pigs or dogs—you name it—out of our clinics, roosters off our cots, and the occasional scorpion or tarantula off the floor of our bedrooms.

We’ve ridden horses, and mules, and oxen—and somebody, on some trip, must have ridden a pig. We’ve ridden in the back of trucks up roads with gravel rocks like softballs, and on mud so slippery we’ve spun into the ditch. We bundled against the rain and cold and felt ourselves whither in the heat. We’ve been peed on by bats, and bitten by mosquitoes and bed bugs and fleas, and dogs; we’ve been yelled at by drunks, sung to, solicited, threatened and befriended. We’ve been kissed, punched, robbed, honored, dined, and thanked. We’ve invented the international signal for six more beers. We’ve been irritated at each other. We’ve wanted to strangle each other—and every trip we laugh so hard our stomachs hurt.

We’ve worked, too, of course. We’ve stitched and touched and smelled and held and washed and talked to our patients. We’ve dressed wounds. Nourished children. Given comfort to the sick. For our patients we’ve paid for ambulances, taxi rides, hotels and medicines. We’ve dug and built and cleaned and painted and fixed. And we’ve gone back again and again.

Why? Here’s one reason. Late one afternoon as the sun went down in a little town called Ranchería, Nicaragua where we’d been helping families rebuild after Hurricane Mitch.. We were finishing up work, gathering our tools. The old woman for whom we were building stepped out of her tiny black plastic and corrugated zinc tent. She and her husband had lost a daughter and grandchild in the mudslide, and there they were, seventy something, starting over. But she had bright eyes and she blinked up a the sky when the purple and pink and orange light lit everybody’s face and gave the new cinderblock walls of the partially constructed house a magic glow.

“Thanks for the day,” she said, to no one in particular, a casual prayer. “Thanks for the night. Gracias por la vida.”