Medical Brigade

From 8.28 to 9.4 I went to my former training town of Ojojona to help out with a medical brigade.

A medical brigade is when a group of doctors from the US come to a town or village in Honduras to see as many patients as they can for free.  In Ojojona, a medical brigade is organized every year with a group of doctors from Beaver PA (the doctors also brought around $15,000 worth of medicine).  So the organizer of the medical brigade also invites Peace Corps people to serve as translators between the doctors and the patients.  Four friends and I agreed to do it – it was a great chance to give back to the town where we had training and it was also a good excuse to get together with a bunch of friends I hadn’t seen in a while.

Overall it was a pretty intense experience – I saw some pretty crazy stuff and learned about health care in Honduras.

Obviously, these people were really poor.  I’m pretty sure that doctor visits are free in Honduras, but the medicine isn’t.  So for a lot of people, this was their 1 chance to get medicine for the year for free.  It was amazing how many people had the same symptoms – it was like they had planned it to try to get the most medicine possible.  And while I would normally be happy if a doctor told me I was fine, they seemed really disappointed – like they had made the trip for nothing.

It was challenging in other areas too.  For most problems, we gave out a 2-4 week supply of medicine.  While this is great, you can pretty much assume that these people aren’t going to start buying their own medicine once the prescription is up.  I wondered how they would take it – if they would take the medicine as prescribed or take a lesser dosage / only when suffering from symptoms to make it last longer.  Also, many of these people couldn’t read, so while we told them how many pills to take per day and for how long, I wondered if they would actually remember.  Anyways, I guess you can only do the best that you can . . .

Before we got started, there was a party for all those involved – including a local band.

Then we started the work.  Here is a guy getting a shot into his gums before they pull a tooth (or 6).  Don’t click on this if you are squeamish.

And then we also had a closing dinner – where one of the doctors entertained us with a few Elvis songs.  The video is pretty dark, but you can feel the love.