February Not Quite Like You Remembered It

For the majority of my life living in the States, I absolutely loathed February. This is indeed my personal bias, but I’ll state my arguments anyway. Being a New Englander, it is very cold and raw in February. It just makes the winter too long. March brings the possibility of an early round or two of golf, but February just has to be endured. For sports fans, February is also a complete wasteland. Oh yes, there is the Super Bowl, but that use to be at the end of January until they made it the first Sunday of February to allow for extended play-off games. Still, after the Super Bowl there is nothing of import (except perhaps badminton games) until college basketball’s March Madness. February is so far away from the beginning of the school year or graduations. And who would ever get married in February. They put Valentine’s Day in February to trick us into believing it has some worth. Besides all that, February is just strange as a month. It doesn’t have enough days, and then its days correspond to March’s days exactly, like Groundhog Day only extended. Then there’s leap year that messes everybody up. I guess the only thing February has going for it is primaries and caucuses for the political junkies in an election year like this one. I’ve never been much of a political junkie. February has just always been difficult to get over.

But here in Honduras, February is a completely different experience. It is the end of school vacation, school begins on February first. Because the Christmas season is overly extended here, it is also the end of the Christmas season (I don’t think they have yet taken down the crèche in the central plaza in La Esperanza). We are now already in the heart of the dry season and summer is beginning. Yes, summer! The days will get drier and hotter, much hotter. With school in session, sports get really serious, especially fútbol (sorry, soccer), kids in full force running up and down the fields. Here, February is anything but boring. It is an amusement park ride and everyone is jumping on.

Ever Bonilla and Angela McCaskill on the radio advertising the brigades

Many of those who are jumping on the February roller coaster are the Shoulder to Shoulder mission trip participants. Whether it is because February is such a grueling month in the States, or because February rocks in Honduras, we have seven brigades scheduled in this all too short of a month, even with the extra, leap year day. One-hundred-three otherwise unknown gringos will come and leave their mark upon the soil of Intibucá over the next 29 days. This is great! This is exciting! We are so much looking forward to it. But at the same time, it means an incredible amount of planning and work.

Mahec
WingateUniversitySchoolofPharm

BRIGADES:

Brown/Wingate is once again going to their clinic in Guachipilincito. They have so many participants, twenty-six, that they have decided to do it in shifts over the course of three weeks. They are also planning on more patient educational days and more professional training days. Our Honduran medical professionals are really looking forward to sharing practice protocols with Brown/Wingate’s team.
Virginia Commonwealth University and Fairfield Family Practice Centers are once again housing themselves at their clinic in Pinares. They serve some of the poorest and most isolated people in the Frontera. We appreciate their long standing commitment.
For the first time ever, Shoulder to Shoulder is hosting Unidad Hospitalaria Móvil Latinoamerica or Latin America Mobile Hospital Unit. They will be providing general and proctologic surgeries for many of our people in the Frontera as well as from La Esperanza. They will be at the hospital in La Esperanza. We are incredibly proud of this new mission and hope that it will be the beginning of a very meaningful relationship.
Mountain Area Health Education Center will return to Camasca with a small contingent of travellers to complete a study and to offer some assistance at the health center there, as well as at our bilingual school.
Johns Hopkins is coming to Santa Lucia once again after a year’s hiatus. It will be a small brigade, but we are pleased and honored to receive them.
Larry Tepe and a small dental brigade will see patients at the clinic in Concepción.
We will complete the month with a mega brigade from Cleveland Clinic and Christ Church of thirty-three people descending upon the small town of Camasca. I’m certain they will be a force to reckon with.

Dental brigade smaller one 013

So for all of you that will be sitting around your house feeling sorry for yourselves as the month of February drags on and on, we invite you to think about coming to Honduras. It’s the place to be this February.

December 2, 2015June 16, 2023

Not According to Plan

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Not According to Plan

From the beginning, the Wyoming brigade did not seem to follow the normal course.
I wanted to meet my young cousin Alex’s friend who was on the brigade with University of Wyoming. Generally the brigade trips arrive on a Saturday night and stay in one of the hotels in La Esperanza. Laura and I see them there and give them welcome and an introduction to Shoulder to Shoulder. But as luck would have it there was a motorcycle meet in La Esperanza and all the hotels were booked. The brigade stayed in Siguatepeque on Saturday night, a city an hour earlier along the road. They did pass through La Esperanza on Sunday and did some sightseeing. We went out looking for them. La Esperanza is a pretty small town. Twenty-three people from Wyoming wandering around the streets do not tend to blend into the crowd. Though we searched for quite some time, we never found them. We were disappointed, both for not giving them good welcome as well as for not finding my cousin’s friend.

Things didn’t seem to be meshing for us or for the brigade. The road to Agua Salada is a challenging one even in the dry season. This year, the rainy season has extended itself on the Frontera and the bus would not be able to fjord the rivers and mud that cross the roads. The twenty-three participants plus their translators herded themselves into the back of pick-ups to make the journey from the Concepción clinic. A bumpy road sitting on the sides of a pick-up bed, somewhere along the road the doctor’s passport must have popped out of his back pocket and fell into the mud. They searched that afternoon, but couldn’t find it. The doctor would have to go back to Tegucigalpa and apply for a new passport in order to be able to return to the States. He decided to stay with the brigade in Agua Salada for Monday and Tuesday and return early Wednesday morning. That same Wednesday morning, Laura and I would walk out to Agua Salada, too late to see the doctor, but perhaps I would meet my cousin’s friend.

There were a lot of people who came to see the brigade. The brigade was now down one doctor (they only had three to start) and the electricity had shut off. Everyone was a bit rushed. I couldn’t remember my cousin Alex’s friend’s name, but I did remember she was a good friend of Alex’s girlfriend Ana. So I just started indiscriminately asking. I got some strange looks from the participants, forgetting that this was the first time we had met and they had no idea who I was. They also didn’t know Alex’s girlfriend Ana’s friend, and I was making a complete fool of myself. The electricity came back on and the brigade more readily treated the patients. Laura and I sat down with the brigade leaders, Joanne and Linda. When we left some time later, I had still not found my cousin’s friend.
It must have been something about this week, the stars aligned in some strange formation, because nothing seemed to go as planned. I couldn’t find my cousin’s friend, the doctor lost his passport, and the electricity went off. This was not the end. Some of the participants went to see the waterfall. As I said, our rainy season here in the Frontera has inexplicably extended itself. The hikers got caught in a torrential downpour. That same downpour once again caused the electricity to fail. On this occasion, the brigade team was meeting with the community and giving them a slide show. No power, no slide show, and no dance to end the night with the community.

In some ways nothing seemed to be going right. But, perhaps we confuse “going right” with “going according to plan.” Certainly things weren’t going as planned, but people were being served, new relationships were established, and old relationships were deepened and confirmed. Maybe things were going right after all, but we had to let go of our expectations to realize it. One of the women from the pregnancy club was not present at the session with the brigade. The brigade decided to make a home visit to see her. It became clear why she had missed the pregnancy club. Indeed, she was already in labor. The brigade visit was made just in time to witness the miracle of life entering the world. There among the doctor and some nursing students, a child made its way among them. Well I suppose that this did not happen according to plan, but still I guess it was something that happened right.
The doctor paid for and got a new passport in Tegucigalpa, and after having done so, a farmer in Agua Salada turned in the original passport found along the side of the road. Oh, well. I still had not found my cousin Alex’s friend. The brigade was in La Esperanza once again on Saturday, and once again, we went looking for them. At first, we found no one, but then a few buying souvenirs. One had bought a machete for her boyfriend and she was also going to a barber to have her eyebrows done. They knew my cousin Alex’s friend who was friends with Alex’s girlfriend Ana. Ruth Lewis was her name and I finally met her on the last day of the brigade. We had a nice chat and I told her to tell Alex to come and visit his older cousin.

October 30, 2015June 16, 2023

Vacationing, But Not So Far Away

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Vacationing, But Not So Far Away

Laura and I are on vacation now. We are on the tropical island of Roatan, off the North Coast of Honduras. I guess I would have to say it’s exactly what you would expect from a tropical paradise. We took a self-guided motor scooter tour up and down the island yesterday and the expansive views of the ocean, the wildlife (iguanas climbing up palm trees a few feet from our bungalow porch), the laid back attitude of island life, all draw us into an “isn’t-this-the-way-life-is-meant-to-be” mood. But both Laura and I are notoriously bad at vacationing, and this one comes at an inopportune time with a great many changes and challenges facing Shoulder to Shoulder. So when we’re not tooling around on a motor scooter, we’re making phone calls or desperately trying to maintain an internet connection. We sneak onto the porch of another unit in order to find a suitable signal to receive and send emails. It’s hard to say what we feel guiltier about, working while we are supposed to be vacationing, or vacationing when we know there is work to be done. So we split it down the middle. That American work ethic drive seems to be imbedded in our DNA.

Lauraroatanscooter — Laura Touring the Island

This is a new Honduras. A running joke between the two of us has been to look at one another and comment, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Intibucá anymore.” We started our vacation with a conference for NGOs doing development work in Honduras in Tela, another vacation destination on the North Coast. The conference was held in an exclusive, luxury resort, and it was a bit surreal to consider all these people working amongst the poorest of the poor coming together in a place that could only be thought of as a dream for most Hondurans. On the second day of the conference, however, we witnessed an impassioned presentation by a Brazilian nun who works with children returning to Honduras after deportation from the United States. The surroundings could not soften the terror of a world where inequity punishes the innocent heartlessly. We’ve seen many of these children on the Frontier of Intibucá. Because of our common commitment with other conference attendees, we made valuable connections and bonds. We also had a day after our conference for an outing on a boat tour. I fished in the ocean for the first time in my life, catching a very large (at least as far as I was concerned) King fish that we later had for lunch. I swam through a tunnel at an isthmus, though I did panic with the surge of the currents. I propped myself up against the rock wall and now have the scars on my back to prove it. But I made it through. Even on vacation, my experiences here are always fresh and startling.
Then on to Roatan on a Ferry out of La Ceiba. English, Spanish, and Garifuna are spoken here, and the island is well developed because of tourism. Money doesn’t necessarily change everything, but it has an obvious impact on some things. The man who is renting us our little apartment here commented that he is displeased that there are so many potholes on the roads. I had to laugh. First, most of the roads here are paved. Second, my understanding of potholes has radically changed since living on the Frontera. Potholes used to represent minor inconvenience for a driver and passengers and the anxious thought that a few more miles had been subtracted from the life of a tire. Now I understand potholes as treacherous challenges to navigation, roughly equivalent to tidal waves for a sailor. There aren’t any real potholes here.

So Laura and I are here in this tropical island, half enjoying our vacation and half trying to maintain our connections in administrating Shoulder to Shoulder, attempting to lose ourselves in the pampering of luxury, but remembering that most of those we know and serve will never experience even a taste of such abundance. We are here, but not altogether, and we remain anxious to return to our beloved Frontera where life is more easily measured by less elusive values. Two days before we began our travels we managed to visit Dr. Doug Stockman from the University of Rochester. He has a brigade team with him in the little village of San Jose in San Marcos de la Sierra. Doug has been there in the little village 25 times. He and his brigade teams have established meaningful relationships of empowerment and dignity with the people of the small village. While we sat with Doug at breakfast, a typically dressed woman entered carrying a large plastic bowl. It was filled with bread that she was selling for a couple of pennies. This is a common sight for Laura and me. I actually recognized the daughter with her as someone I had seen on the busses selling the same bread. The woman smiled. We smiled back, and politely said thank you, but we wouldn’t be buying any bread. She continued to smile, came closer to us, whereupon Doug recognized her.

She is part of Rochester’s micro loaning program. Her business of selling bread, oatmeal, and tamales to the townspeople and travelers along the highway, is financed by small loans of about $150 or $300. She was actually there to pay back the capital and the interest of 1% incurred over a six month time frame. Doug engaged her and Laura and I translated. She could not be happier or more grateful that Rochester has given her this opportunity. She has two businesses, one is the selling of the food items that she prepares, and the other is raising a few chickens and some pigs. The food selling business is going great. She lost all of her chickens to a disease, but she was able to sell off one of her pigs to buy more chickens. She is certain they will soon be laying eggs and she will be making a profit. I observed this woman as I translated for her. I felt humbled by her as she beamed with pride and a sense of confidence and self-worth. She was feeding and providing for her family, a singular ambition, a dream fulfilled in a relationship formed in dignity and respect. I think of her now as I am relaxing in this island paradise. How much more opportunity is present among these Island people who vacuum up the dollars of foreigners who dive in their oceans and bask in their sun. And yet, I do not see any greater pride or a deeper sense of fulfillment.
What wonderful things I am privileged to see. I am in a tropical paradise. Every day of my life is filled with new wonders of how rich the human spirit is.