I’ve Been Away Too Long
Stepping off the airplane in San Pedro Sula, Honduras my first thought was: I’ve been away from Latin America for too long. In the back of my mind I remembered, but had not prepared myself for the long lines, the inefficient bureaucracy and the no-paper-in-the-toilet bathrooms. And that was just in the airport. But returning to these things wasn’t a negative. In fact, I felt and still feel incredibly comfortable with these things, sort of like a returning home comfort feeling.
I’ve traveled around Latin America a fair deal. With others and by myself, for fun and for work and for school. In rural areas and in large cities. But never have I experienced anything like a medical brigade, and never have I been anywhere quite like Santa Anna.
For the past 10 years, Baylor Shoulder to Shoulder has been sending a medical brigade of attendings, residents and students to Santa Anna, a highly rural town half in Honduras and half in El Salvador. Part of the brigade provides care I n a clinic in Santa Anna for a week and a half while the other part takes day trips to surrounding villages. Sometimes the brigade practices only family medicine; this time the focus of the trip is on gynecological exams as well. As such, I’ve brought with me two new technologies. The first is a gynecological lab in a backpack that can be taken with us on the numerous village visits we make. The second is a portable hand washing system. It can be taken on village visits or left at the clinic. This device is my baby, the result of a years’ work through a senior design class.
To reach Santa Anna we drove eight hours over bumpy roads, twisting and turning on mountain passageways, passing through various climate regions. Finally, we arrived in a town with one main road, a church, a primary school, and no more than a handful of homes. There are 700 people here, but because most of them live in the hills outside of the main town, it feels like much less. Which is not to say that the town is deserted; chickens and cows roam the streets accompanied by stray dogs and the occasional horse. The climate here is highly tropical: we’ve just entered the rainy season which means short bursts of incredibly forceful storms followed by bright sun and, of course, lots of heat and humidity. It’s like a Houston summer on steroids.
When we arrive Sunday afternoon we look over the building we’ll be working in for the next week and a half. It’s a partially finished concrete structure that Baylor had been working on for a few years now. With the recession, it hasn’t been completed as was expected, so a whole second level has yet to be set up. Eventually, the building will have dorms, indoor showers, etc, but not yet. So we pitch tents (to protect from mosquitoes) on concrete floors, set up colposcopy machines that were a hassle to to bring down, unload medicines and look out at our kingdom.