Today, we attempted something no other PH team has ever done – treat 400 patients in one day. PH started supporting one school in the highlands, expanded to two, then to three, and this year to five. And all in one day – whew!
And we do this all in the highlands area – a little more than 2+ hours bus ride outside of the capital city of Tegucigalpa. We are literally on a school bus, and, amazingly, these buses can even make it all the way up and back. The roads are terrible. This year, the road has degraded even further. For most of the trip, it is a dirt road, and the rain has produced deep, deep grooves and divots – it is quite a washboard. And the roads are super narrow. You can barely pass a vehicle coming the other way in many sections. In fact, in some areas, we are inches away from reaching out and touching a vehicle going the other way. And there is so much dirt kicked up by vehicles and the wind. All the houses alongside the road must be covered in dirt. We breathed in that dust and dirt all along the way. I wiped the top of the school bus seat in front of me, and within 10 minutes, it already had another coating. I couldn’t imagine living in these communities – you would have to be ok with constant dust/dirt everywhere.
Our home base for our medical/dental brigade was Juanacate school, and the other 4 schools would walk to us – some would walk for over an hour to get to us. This is the only time this area sees medical professionals – when a team like this comes to them. In these remote communities, most residents do not have the means or the transportation opportunity to even buy something as basic as Tylenol. For them, our offering of vitamins for both adults and kids, along with anti-parasite medicine, is highly valuable. They will travel for hours and wait in line for hours to be seen by a doctor/dentist and have access to free medicines. In the meantime, our volunteers help entertain the kids, offering them fun things to do – face painting, temporary tattoos, coloring, nail polish, building activities, soccer, and just giving them attention.
We had 5 doctors and 4 dentists, and they worked non-stop. The dentists pulled an incredible number of teeth – one person had 5 teeth pulled. XiXi even got to pull a tooth. She has been a dental assistant for the past four years, watching what the dentists do. So this year, the dentist let her pull a tooth. That will be a memory she will never forget.
After many long hours, we did it as a team! I think our final count of patients seen was around 430! We packed everything up, loaded it back onto the bus, and drove the two-hour ride back down. We are all so tired. I don’t know where our young adults found the energy, but they sang and danced on the bus the entire trip back down. It was quite impressive how much energy they had.
We ended the day with a team dinner at a Chinese restaurant. It was delicious, and we were hungry. We each shared the highlights of our day and gave shout-outs to other team members for a job well done.
I was too tired to even take a shower when I got back to the room, even though I felt gross, covered in layers of sweat and dirt. We left at 6:15 in the morning and got back to our hotel around 10 pm – one very long day! We leave tomorrow morning again at 6:15 am – back up to the Highlands area – written by Jennifer Alexander
Thank you to our newest partner, Wine to Water, for these incredible DROP Filters. David and Omar installed and demonstrated several of these for local mothers. We all know clean water is essential. We are so blessed to partner with this incredible organization and serve clean water!