After years of talk and no action, I finally decided to expand my horizons in dental skills. For the seventh time, my wife Karen and I said goodbye to friends and neighbors on a cold winter morning and joined a group of dedicated and talented volunteers. These volunteers leave the comfort and safety of their homes and jobs to provide health services to the underserved and forgotten poor in the remote villages of Honduras. The group we go with is International Health Services (IHS) and they have been providing critical health care in Honduras for over 20 years. They go as a large group that splits up into about 9 or 10 teams to go to the places where they are needed the most. Most are clinics but one or two sites will have a surgery team as well. I was the team Engineer and I helped the radio operator as well in Uhi, one of the more remote villages in La Moskitia on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras. It is in an area accessible only by small airplane or by boat. The hospital in Puerto Lempira, 20 miles away as the crow flies, provides the only dental, medical, and surgical care to the area. Patients travel miles by foot and/or boat from Uhi and other villages to get care there and that is only if they have enough money to pay for it. Usually it is only a few dollars for medical services but that is far more than most of them have. While we were in the village, our patients who needed surgical procedures were also transported to the Puerto Lempira hospital by our small airplane. There we had a small surgical team who did many procedures each day.
This year, our clinical team in Uhi consisted of a dentist, a Spanish speaking translator, a doctor, a nurse practitioner, an LPN, a pharmacist, a ham radio operator, an engineer (me), and several general helpers. Karen was the Team Leader and worked as a general helper as well.
Providing dental and medical care in a third world country requires a lot of flexibility, creativity, patience, and humor. The village has a couple wells, on some the pump was broken. There is no electricity so all the pumps are the hand operated type. No problem, we fly in our drinking water on the same small plane that dropped us off with our supplies there in the village. Local women did our laundry and got it cleaner than any washing machine I’ve ever seen. We also used the local water to fill our solar shower bags so we would have hot showers after our long days of clinic work.
During our nine days of work in the village, our medical clinic saw over 500 patients, many of them young children. We gave all of them vitamins and parasite medication in addition to meds for their particular ailments. Some teams have an American dentist. In our dental clinic, Manuel only had time to pull bad teeth. In the end he pulled nearly 500 teeth. He lives and works as a dentist in the Honduran city of LaCeiba and has traveled with our team to Uhi for the past 3 years. His two weeks with our team is the only dental care the village sees so pulling teeth is all he has time to do. He is mostly self sufficient by sliding the special made aluminum chair up to a window so he has enough light to work. The village has no electricity (or phones or roads). We do have a small generator but with a limited amount of gasoline, we use it for lighting only if he has a difficult extraction. We mostly use it to operate the ham radio so we can talk to our administration team in LaCeiba each day.
My involvement with dental work was I would sometimes become Manuel’s trusted assistant. Some young children had no idea what to expect as they were on the chair. When Manuel came with the lidocaine, it sometimes took me and the kid’s mom to hold them down. Another task I did was to register the many dental patients waiting in line by filling out a sheet of paper with their name, village, and age. This is a fun task considering my limited Spanish abilities. My wife, Karen, does patient registration and many other things over in the medical clinic area so she shows me what to do for these medical type tasks. A few years ago, my niece, Amy, went with us. She is a dental assistant back in the U.S. So, I did not have much chance to do dental assisting work. She worked with an American dentist, Leon, who goes to Honduras every February. Amy was also able to pull a few teeth, one job I have not had the chance to do yet. Maybe Manuel doesn’t trust my grip.
What I remember most about my experience in Honduras (besides the continual crowing of the roosters in the morning) are the people, especially the children and their laughter. They live in poverty that most of us can’t begin to imagine. Yet, they smile easily and often. As we walked through the village, we would be followed by the sounds of children laughing. As for the roosters, next time I will heed the advice to bring ear plugs or a sharp machete.
If you are interested in going on an International Health Services mission or providing support, visit our web site at www.IHSOFMN.org. Nearly all of our dentists and other medical folks come from the U.S. IHS is always looking for dentists, dental helpers, and other medical folks to join both clinical and surgical teams. Going is as easy as filling out an application. Besides dental folks, IHS can use doctors, nurses, engineers, Spanish speaking translators, ham radio people, pharmacists, anesthetists, and many general helpers for each February mission. You can usually bring your spouse, too, if you want. To talk about the dental aspects of the mission, contact Leon Ernster, our Dental Director at 507-285-0544 or at Ernster@sparc.isl.net For more general information, feel free to contact Karen or me at 320-634-4386 or JMKKEK@Yahoo.com I can also provide you with a CD that has hundreds of photos, village stories, plus several great Power Point presentations.
I hope to see you soon !