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.

CMMB MVP's for Change

Hi Readers,

Recently I have created a fund with the Catholic Medical Mission Board to support my volunteer work here in Honduras. If you'd like to read about the fund, the Catholic Medical Mission Board, or make a donation, please visit the following link:

http://support.cmmb.org/site/TR/Events/General?pg=fund&fr_id=1010&px=1109422

Thanks very much for your support! Below I have included the piece I wrote for the Catholic Medical Mission Board summing up the bulk of what I have been doing on the Ranch since my arrival. I include this because other than the “typical week” I related months back, I really have not described my job in any detail.

My primary responsibility on the NPH Ranch has been to manage the construction and operation of a brand new surgery center. Begun in 2004, the center is the vision of Dr. Peter Daly, an orthopedic surgeon from the U.S., and longtime NPH director Reinhart Koehler, whose goals are to provide a vehicle for bettering the health and medical care of underserved populations in this area through improved access to surgical services, which are in desperate need. My job is to communicate with project leadership to organize and execute construction tasks, as well as facilitate activities at the surgery center in construction, maintenance, and medical service provision. The center is nearly finished, having installed anesthesia gases and suction piping this past week, and we are currently planning final modifications to prepare the facility for licensure and certification by the Honduran Ministry of Health. Our leadership is also looking at long-term business and operational plans, which must cover the building’s expenses and upkeep while allowing access for poor and underserved Hondurans at prices they can afford. The center hopes to partner the expertise of U.S. and European medical brigades with Honduran care providers to exchange medical knowledge and elevate the country’s level of care while providing high-quality, affordable surgical services. Primary care for surgery center patients, including triage and follow-up, will occur at NPH’s external clinic, which is staffed by volunteer and Honduran medical staff and serves roughly 40 patients daily. Currently, the surgery center is being used once per week by a Honduran surgeon for small surgical procedures (e.g. removal of cysts, in-grown toenails, and benign tumors), and these patients are triaged at our clinic. They pay a symbolic nominal fee.

A second project of mine was to provide all needy children on the ranch with glasses. This project was begun last January by a volunteer ophthalmologist who examined almost all the children, fitted those in need with a supply of frames, and negotiated with the public hospital optometrist to make the lenses. Upon her departure in August, I finished her work by bringing the remaining children she did not examine to Tegucigalpa for eye exams, helping those who need glasses choose their frames, and taking prescriptions and frames to the optometrist. We just received our final group of glasses from the optometrist last week, so now the vast majority of children who need glasses, excepting those new to the ranch, have received them. Future work in this area would include keeping up to date with new arrivals, changing prescriptions, and repairing frames, and as we must pay for these services in Tegucigalpa this likely will be continued by other clinic staff.

My other duties include helping the Honduran surgeon to provide medical services at the surgery center. I call the patients to come for surgery, act as an assistant during the procedures, and clean up afterwards. For one weekend, I also helped the NPH International medical team to check on water filters brought to rural Olancho by a Virginian medical brigade, and I will likely help the brigade again when they return in the spring (see “La Hicaca”). Future ideas include making a public health presentation about diet, exercise, and common illnesses to children in our school during their science classes when they begin next February, and possibly working with our IT volunteer to try to implement in the clinic some rudimentary form of an electronic medical records database.

That about sums it up right now. Please consider making a contribution to the CMMB fund, or to NPH Honduras. Also coming soon will be a recap of a productive visit by Dr. Daly and his medical team that really whipped the surgery center into shape, and pictures of my surfing trip to El Salvador. Stay tuned.