Sunday, February 15, 2009

Please Donate to Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos and the Catholic Medical Mission Board


Ok, this is it – my one-time, simple request to readers to support the very good work happening at NPH. To recap, NPH is a non-profit, Catholic organization supporting thousands of orphaned and abandoned children in 9 countries across Latin America. These children are blessed with a stable, loving home that gives them food, clothing, shelter, health care, and opportunities in higher education and vocational training to better their futures and break the cycles of poverty, abuse, and neglect that they have experienced. The children also benefit from the work international volunteers, who give specialized skill sets to expand and enrich the services supporting the children. These areas include teaching, care giving, health, and physical and occupational therapy. The Honduras branch alone is the family for over 500 current Pequeños. NPH also reaches out to the local community with nearly free health care services to needy Hondurans in our community. My work as a clinic assistant is a part of this effort.

In my particular volunteer work as a clinic assistant, I have been blessed to have the sponsorship of the Catholic Medical Mission Board. CMMB is a non-profit that sponsors and places volunteer health care workers all over the world who dedicate themselves to improving third world health care. CMMB has financially supported my year of volunteer service, with airfare and health insurance, so I could come to NPH Honduras, support the clinics here, and work at the Surgery Center that provides direly needed surgical services for the poor at a token of the cost.

Please support these necessary efforts to lift up our brothers and sisters living in poverty in Latin America. As my grandma Treacy would tell me, you can give time, talent, or treasure, and all are important. NPH cannot function without the continued support of its sponsors, and it is all the more evident during this time of economic crises. Our home has laid off care givers, teachers, and the entire psychology department, just to name a few, in anticipation of a 30-40 percent drop in funding. While these are hard times for everyone, this definitely includes non-profits. If you are able to give, your contribution really will make a difference in the lives of these children. I know firsthand. Please give, and you’ll feel good about doing it!

Donations to NPH can be through Friends of the Orphans, the non-profit fundraising organization for NPH in the U.S. http://www.friendsoftheorphans.org/s/769/start.aspx. You can also choose to continually support a particular child, and exchange letters, photos, and communication with him or her.

If you would like learn more about the Catholic Medical Mission Board, please visit http://www.cmmb.org/. I have also set up a special page to help finance the support I receive, which can be viewed at http://support.cmmb.org/site/TR/Events/General?px=1109422&pg=fund&fr_id=1010. Thank you very, very much for your support.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Long Overdue Update: Christmas, David, Work

I'd bet that the countless loyal followers out there (if there are any left) are all but certain the blog has retired to greener pastures, but on a chilly February Sunday in Honduras I've managed to zap some life back in it. With so much to report, I’ll limit myself to give a hasty run-down of as much as I can remember from the last 7, 8 weeks (cringe)…

Well, Christmas was nice (a belated Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year). All the volunteers took a two week break from work and watched over the kids while the employees vacationed over the holidays with their families. It was something of a one-species Zoo. On Christmas eve and New Year’s we made gigantic bonfires, the kind of which could easily start a forest fire, for which the Discipulos Hogar, Finn, and I had to cut and haul about two dozen trees from the forest in which we live. Not fun. The kids roasted marshmallows as close as they dared, until the falling ash made such endeavors doubly dangerous and amidst their complaints we pushed them back for their own safety. No one was burned.

On Christmas day, all the kids went walked to various nearby villages to give away some of their clothes to residents. It was really quite heartwarming. Above are pictures in La Venta, a small town just up the highway. In the first, some Pequenos have stopped to bring clothing to the red house.

After two weeks of Christmas/babysitting chaos, my fellow volunteers and I were ready for a break. I was fortunate to then have the visit of my brother David from Jan 3 – 17. We spent a week on the Ranch and I did my best to show him around and give him the full experience. He weeded in the Hortaliza, swam at the dam, watched Dr. Cerna operate, and played with the kids during vacation courses. Then we escaped to travel Guatemala, which was a terrific time. We hit up a plethora of touristy but breathtaking sites, highlighted by a large clear lake nestled between three volcanoes, hiking an active volcano, and seeing the Mayan ruins in Copan. It was especially amazing to see multitudes of indigenous Guatemalans speaking their various local, indecipherable tongues as they conducted business in crowded marketplaces, wearing colorful woven cloths traditional of their still-vibrant native culture. The NPH Guatemala home also welcomed us for a night and showed us around their complex. It was a great week.

After seeing David head back to the U.S. to find a job, I’ve been focusing on work. Currently we are making final preparations to try to organize a surgical brigade from the States sometime this spring. My most important tasks are to install an automatic transfer system to turn our backup generator in the inevitable situation of a power outage during surgery, and get our license from the Honduran Ministry of Health. This is a tedious process involving applications, building plans, environment codes, and inspections. We also have the usual mix of nagging, minor construction projects (closet shelving, curtains, door installations, floor sealing, and other facile tasks made more difficult by a lack of dedicated, qualified workers).

That about wraps up the basics, for brevity I’ll leave it at that and spare more boring details. One last thing of note is that we are in the transition time for the January volunteers. We have six more here from the U.S., Spain, and Germany, and we are losing the old group (about 10, including my buddy Finn). Next weekend we will say goodbye to this incredible group of people, who will go their separate ways to travel Central America before heading back to the States, Spain, and Germany. They will be missed.

Soon to come will be information about how readers can donate to NPH and the Catholic Medical Mission Board. Stay tuned