Hondopost
Only the good news of HondurasJoint Task Force-Bravo
Airmen give medical aid in Honduras
By Patrick Winn
October 25, 2007
Airmen and soldiers from Joint Task Force-Bravo, stationed in central Honduras, offered basic medical care to villagers near the Soto Cano Air Base by the city of Comayagua.
The Medical Readiness Training Mission supplied more than 350 Hondurans with preventative medicine or simple procedures. Dentists treated nearly 140 locals and others were given gynecological or veterinary treatment from the Honduran Ministry of Health, which collaborated on the mission.
Led by Air Force Maj. Larry Taylor, a pharmacist deployed to Soto Cano, the mission also offered lessons on hand washing, food preparation and personal hygiene to 785 Hondurans. One woman walked for more than three hours to get lotion for her baby’s skin rash.
“This gives us rural medical experience,” said Capt. Michelle Sredinski, deployed from the Air Force Academy. She noted lacking the “luxury of labs and X-Rays” and added that the airmen “get to see how the people live and what they go through.”
Honduras, where the average person earns $763 per year, is the continent’s third poorest nation. Airmen and soldiers from Joint Task Force-Bravo have conducted medical exercises there since 1994.
Mercy Ships
Local doctor gets fulfillment helping around the world
Dr. Carl Luther is a man on a mission. Literally.
Luther, a 47-year-old board- certified family physician from Snohomish, has been practicing medicine for more than 20 years and is the on-board physician for the Africa Mercy, a hospital ship in the Mercy Ships fleet.
Mercy Ships is a faith-based medical missions organization located near Tyler, Texas. Mercy Ships provides more than $670 million in services across the globe to the Third World and developing countries.
But what makes a hometown doctor from Snohomish leave his familiar and comfortable environs to visit troubled and beleaguered areas such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Liberia?
Faith.
“I’ve been involved in charitable outreaches with faith-based organizations for some time,” Luther said. “You get a vision for the needs of these developing nations, and it gets in your blood when you see what these people need as far as medical care.”
As a medical student at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Mo., Luther received a scholarship to do a Third World outreach in 1985.
“My first outreach was to Honduras. I really saw what I was learning in medical school, and where it was needed most,” Luther said.
That spiritual desire for service and good works followed him through his career as a physician with the U.S. Army and as a flight surgeon, making time to take regular mission trips.
That passion eventually led him to take a huge leap of faith, to walk off the beaten path and go where his faith and expertise was needed most.
While at the Snohomish Family Medical Center, the clinic had a program that granted their physicians a yearlong sabbatical. Luther took the opportunity to work with the Mercy Ships organization.
“When my year was up I returned to work and, to say the least, I was ruined for the ordinary,” Luther said.
Luther left the practice in October 2006 to join Mercy Ships on a full-time basis and has been in 70 different nations and sailed into 550 different ports around the globe.
The latest mission took him to the Republic of Liberia, a small country in west Africa that has been shattered by civil war, strife and hunger.
When the aptly named Africa Mercy arrived in Liberia, Luther was stunned by the medical needs.
“The sheer need, working from sunup to sundown. The need was unending,” Luther said. “But it wasn’t just the medical care, but also the spiritual care that we could give them, to speak into their lives.”
In Liberia, even the most basic medical needs are overlooked or not addressed. To remove a growth in someone’s mouth would be a simple procedure in the U.S. In Liberia, the growth could enlarge over the years until it suffocates the patient.
Luther recalled a 10-year-old Liberian boy with a cleft lip who had been orphaned after his mother had died from disease. People with that facial deformity are usually despised in the superstitious Liberian culture, and often remain outcasts.
He was found by a crew member in an orphanage, then brought back to the ship where he was treated. Now the boy looks like a normal child.
These are just some of the needs that Luther and the medical team aboard the Africa Mercy deal with.
“In Liberia a benign tumor can grow up to 7 pounds. We have the ability to remove these tumors and other things. Things that people in their village believe make them demon possessed, making them shunned,” Luther said. “Because of these simple surgeries, we are able to restore them in their community.”
To date, Mercy Ships have provided 32,500 of these surgeries throughout the world.
Luther expects to be aboard the Africa Mercy soon as the ship and crew return to West Africa. Luther is naturally enthusiastic about the need to help elsewhere in the world.
“I would recommend it to anyone, the need is there,” Luther said. “As the saying goes, the fields are ripe with harvest but the harvesters are few.”
Shoulder to Shoulder
Honduran villagers get assist from Pittsburgh medical workers
By Craig Smith
Pittsburg Tribune-Review
September 17, 2007
Diane Balliet thought she was crazy to get involved with a medical mission to a remote mountain village in Honduras.
“I was a hospital nurse from Indiana University. I did regular floor nursing. I never worked in an office or a clinic,” said Balliet, 54, of O’Hara. “I don’t speak Spanish.”
Nonetheless, she has made 11 trips to the village of San Jose Del Megrito since 2001 with the Pittsburgh chapter of Shoulder To Shoulder, a Cincinnati nonprofit organization.
“She is the glue. She keeps it together,” said C. Bernie Good, a staff physician at VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, associate professor of medicine and pharmacy at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the Shoulder to Shoulder board.
Balliet soon will make her 12th trip to San Jose, joining a group of physicians, medical students, nurses and other volunteers who will leave Oct. 7 for two weeks in the village. “We’re there to help them fix themselves,” said Balliet, a nurse at Shadyside Hospital for 32 years.
That includes treating villagers and educating them about their respiratory problems.
“They grow coffee beans and roast them in houses with no chimneys,” she said.
San Jose is a village of 1,500 people in the El Negrito District of Yoro Province. It has no electricity and only one solar telephone. Water is piped down the mountain but is often contaminated.
Fifty percent to 60 percent of children suffer from malnutrition on a typical diet of rice, beans and tortillas. The poorest families don’t have rice.
The Pittsburgh group will practice a different type of medicine there, said Good, who spent a couple of months in India during his fourth year as a medical student.
“It’s not just about machines and tests. You can’t get a CT scan. You learn more of the humanizing side,” said Good, who will make his fifth trip with the group next month.
The Pittsburgh group first visited the region after Hurricane Mitch hit in 1998, said Dr. William Markle, a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in McKeesport.
Markle and his colleagues, Dr. N. Randall Kolb, co-director of the UPMC Shadyside family medicine residency program, and Dr. Mark Meyer, a physician in East Liberty, visited the region six months after the hurricane hit and decided to do something about what they saw.
A mobile clinic was donated to the community, and a permanent clinic was established.
Markle has seen the impact the village — and its residents — can have on visitors.
“People do come back changed. It’s an eye-opener,” he said.
AmeriCares
AmerCares airlifts relief to Nicaragua and Honduras
September 13, 2007
In the aftermath of Hurricane Felix, which ripped through the Caribbean leaving much destruction, AmeriCares, the international relief organization, is sending an emergency airlift of critical medicines and aid to help the people affected in Nicaragua and Honduras.
AmeriCares will load the relief at its warehouse in Stamford, CT, and deliver it via truck to Miami, FL, where an additional supply of emergency aid was shipped by AmeriCares in preparation for the violent hurricanes that recently swept through the Caribbean. The combined shipment of critical medicines and supplies will then be airlifted from Miami, with an anticipated Sunday night lift-off, to arrive in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua and Tegucigalpa, Honduras on Monday. The emergency aid includes antibiotics, pain relievers, hygiene products and other medicines and supplies. An AmeriCares relief team is on its way to Nicaragua to receive the airlift and distribute the aid there.
In Nicaragua, some 50,000 people were affected by Hurricane Felix, and in Honduras, another 18,000 were impacted. AmeriCares will deliver the aid to its long-time partner in both countries, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, who will distribute the aid.
Christian Aid
Christian Aid: Hurricane Felix relief effort
September 11, 2007
Local organisations supported by Christian Aid in Nicaragua and Honduras are stepping up relief efforts after the devastating hurricane, which has left more than 200 people dead or missing, and tens of thousands homeless.
Hurricane Felix hit north-eastern Nicaragua on Tuesday 4 September as a maximum strength category five storm, with wind speeds of up to 160 miles per hour.
The Atlantic coastal communities of Sandy Bar Bay and Bilwi, also known as Puerto Cabezas, were the worst hit. The hurricane damaged or destroyed almost all the houses here, affecting more than 150,000 people.
Christian Aid is responding through ACT (Action by Churches Together), an international network of church-based agencies that come together to co-ordinate humanitarian response work.
We have sent £20,000 to support local organisations’ immediate relief activities, distributing food parcels, clean water, medicines, soap, cooking kits, blankets and shelter materials to homeless families.
‘We are working closely with other ACT members to co-ordinate our response and avoid duplication,’ explains Neptaly Medina, Christian Aid’s emergencies officer for Central America.
After pummelling Nicaragua, Felix swept on through Honduras. The storm weakened over land, but heavy rains still caused flooding and landslides, destroying homes, roads, bridges, drains and crops.
In the northern Honduran province of Cortés, the River Ulúa rose by almost eight metres and broke its banks.
Christian Aid’s local partners had been monitoring the river closely. They helped identify shelters, organise emergency evacuations and build flood barriers.
Now these local organisations are distributing food, water, plastic sheeting and mattresses to families who had to flee their homes.
CASM (the Mennonite Social Action Committee), a local organisation supported by Christian Aid, has been running disaster preparedness workshops with communities near the River Ulúa for over a year, helping them to set up early warning systems, local risk maps and evacuation plans.
As Felix blew in, CASM provided fuel, rope, waterproof jackets and boots to help with emergency evacuations.
Partners in Honduras began immediate relief efforts by drawing on their reserve funds. Christian Aid will be sending more money to support their continued relief and rehabilitation work over the coming weeks and months.
Local organisations overseas supported by Christian Aid are at the forefront when disasters and emergencies strike. You can help support their work by donating to our Emergencies fund.
