A Summer in Honduras 2010: So much to write...So little bandwidth

7/5/10

I Met up with s2s and headed out to my new home for the next 2 weeks Santa Lucia, Honduras at the southern end of the country near El Salvador. The immediate town of Santa Lucia is a very nice area with coble streets throughout the entire community…however once you get out of the town it is much poorer and mountainous. On our trip to Santa Lucia we stayed one night in La Esperanza and one night in Concepcion before finally arriving in Santa Lucia. On Sunday morning we had a trial CHI run through, which is Shoulder to Shoulders Child Health Initiative program. The program involves a 5 station rotation: Enema blood test, height and weight, vision, dental, and a doctor consultation. With my experience I was put in charge of the…dental station. We saw 31 students that morning and I distributed tooth brushes, instructed proper dental technique, and discussed the bad effects of sugary food. After this we went left for Santa Lucia. All in all we were in a bus for about 8 long hours until finally reaching the Santa Lucia clinic on Sunday afternoon. The clinic is large with its own “emergency room”, X-ray machine, and an entire maternity ward (pictures soon). I am on the list to shadow a doctor during an overnight shift so it should be very interesting. Tomorrow we are heading out to a small aldea to do our first field CHI program and once again I will be counting cavities and teaching dental hygiene.

7/20/2010

So a lot has happened since I was last able to write in my blog (there is limited bandwidth for the internet here at the clinic in Santa Lucia). I will do my best to catch everyone up on the highlights of the last two weeks, which include why I am now staying in Honduras until August 19^th and my 21^st birthday travels…what an adventure that was! And once again thank you all for reading :)

I spent 2 weeks down in Santa Lucia with a brigade of recently graduated nursing students from Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, A doctor and his resident from UNC-Greensboro Hospital, and an assortment of other professional (Dentists, RNs, Medical students, etc.) The group went on several CHIs in neighboring aldeas and I accompanied them on a few of them, acting as a translator, pharmacist, and pseudo dentist. I was also able to go with a doctor on a home visit to the house of a 58 year old man who was unable to make the trip down to the local clinic. He was a chronic smoker with emphysema and hypertension standing at 5’ 1” and 78 pounds he looked like he was in his 70s.

We also took a day trip to El Salvador because Santa Lucia is only about a 2 hour walk to the border of the 2 countries. Walking to the border I was expected some sort of indication that we were crossing into El Salvador…some type of sign or border guard or something. To my surprise there was nothing, only an old walking bridge connecting the two countries…it was very anticlimactic. After spending a half an hour in El Salvador we turned around and returned to Honduras. On the way back we passed a cemetery that was decorated with very bright artificial flowers, and there was also a funeral going on…which I didn’t realize until I looked at my pictures (look in the back right in my second cemetary picture).

(the river which runs along the Honduras/El Salvador border)

(Click to enlarge the picture of the bridge)

(And there is the funeral in the back right)

I will also be staying in Honduras for an extra 4 weeks than I had originally planned. I will be directing a NIH study that Shoulder to shoulder is currently involved with...running the entire study from down here examining upper respiratory infections in children under 5 years old that come to the clinic in Santa Lucia and Magdalena (another nearby clinic). The job entails recruiting patients, administering a questionnaire, collecting diagnostic data (heart rate, temperature, breathing rate) and epithelial cell samples from the upper nasal passages (es un poco íncomodo), making and freezing 3 epithelial samples, running a flu test, reading the medical charts, and finally entering all the data into two separate databases. It is definitely a lot of work but it has been a great experience so far and I have recruited 5 patients of my own J. I am sure to have more stories about this in the coming month as I recruit new patients.

Finally my last highlight of the past two weeks…my birthday. On Friday the 16^th, the brigade and I traveled the long 8 hour drive back to San Pedro Sula because the group was heading back home the following morning. San Pedro Sula, also known as the murder capital of Central America, is in northern Honduras and not really the best place in the world to celebrate your 21^st birthday…especially after dark. Because of this, our group stuck inside the guarded hotel walls and celebrated my birthday by the pool. It was a very fun night swimming and spending one last night with everyone who I had worked with for the last 2 weeks. But, the adventure starts the next morning on my actual birthday…July 17^th. Going with my usual track record with birthdays, this one was not that great. I spent the day by myself traveling from the northern end of Honduras all the way south back to Santa Lucia. I switched buses in La Esparanza and got onto a bus made for 40 with 60 already on board. So I paid my 90 limperas (less than 5$) and crammed on…standing along with many of the other people on board. After about an hour standing on the bus I decided to ride on top of the bus with most of the luggage (I had seen people do it before and knew it was okay)…So I rode on the top of the bus for the next 4 hours of the ride. This was the adventure part of my trip. Ducking branches and low lying power lines, I made my way down through Honduras with only a few problems…the bus got stuck once and I climbed off…and it started raining for the last hour I was on top of the bus. I eventually make it back to the clinic 9 hours after leaving San Pedro...it was certainly a birthday I will never forget.