I can’t believe May is almost over and along with it, my 5 month mark here in Honduras. I mostly just look back in awe of how fast this time has gone by. The month of May in particular for me was filled with a variety of emotions stretching from fun, joy, sadness, and frustration. The first weekend of May was spent on a much anticipated trip with 4 other volunteers to the National Park La Tigra located a few hours outside of Tegucigalpa. It was a perfectly relaxing, pampering weekend where we spent two nights at a beautiful bed and breakfast, ate some really good non-Honduran food, and explored the cloud forest on a 5 hour hike to a waterfall (lacking a little water after the dry season, although pretty), and just enjoying a little time away from the Ranch.
My last couple weekends as ‘Nurse on-call’ I was stretched emotionally and tested in my ability to function well in new environments and on lack of sleep. The first weekend began on a Friday afternoon taking one of our littlest toddlers into the hospital, and I stayed the evening worrying in the emergency room with her and her caregiver. I got a little bit of sleep staying the night at the NPH University girls’ house. Then next morning I walked to the public city hospital that was just a few blocks away to stay the day with another little NPH girl who had been admitted a few days earlier. After managing to get her finally discharged around mid-day, I made it back to the Ranch just in-time to attend mass. I got to spend a few minutes with my kids in Hogar before I got a phone call that one of the elderly members of NPH living in the Grandparents’ house was sick. Low and behold, I ended up doing back to the hospital for a third time within a day. I stayed the night there with him (still in my church clothes) and sleeping in the ever so comfy emergency room chair. I returned home late morning Sunday emotionally and physically exhausted from spending almost all of the last 48 hours bouncing from one hospital to the next.
This past weekend was almost a repeat, but this time instead of spending the night in a private hospital, I was with one of our boys in the Children’s medical unit of the city, public hospital. This hospital is the teaching hospital and has many specialties, but operates with very little resources. If your family member needs any medical supplies such as a bag of IV fluid or some sort of dressing, you physically have to go across the street to the pharmacy and buy it for them. You also must bring your own towel, toilet paper, soap, water, carry your own labs to the laboratory, etc. You have to work hard to find out any sort of information about any plan of care, otherwise it is very easy to just get lost in the system and be there for days without much being done. Although flawed, it leaves me with much more appreciation for our American healthcare system. So there we were, in a room with 6 beds and each bed had a small chair beside it for the mother (or me as the stand-in for the night). There was quite a social community feeling in the room where the mother’s had made friends with each other, everyone was generously sharing food, stories, and cell phone calls. I read some stories to my patient and the little toddler in the bed next to him, and we even managed to get a group Uno game together. When it was time to sleep, some of the mothers who didn’t prefer their hard plastic sitting chair to sleep in pulled out plastic bags or pieces of cardboard and laid them down on the floor to sleep. Torn between the better of my three options of squeezing onto the cot with my patient, utilizing his wheelchair, or just settling for the floor, I eventually ended up joining the other mother’s on the floor. To say the least, I didn’t sleep a ton that night, as I would occasionally wake up to the sounds of children vomiting or crying in pain, or the Nurse coming in to give medications. But on the positive side, my little patient did sleep well and stayed in a positive mood through most of the ordeal.
The weekend prior was our Volunteer retreat which was a nice weekend away with the whole staff, which rarely happens because half of us work opposite weekends. We stayed just outside a little touristy town in the mountains called Valle de Angeles. I helped plan the weekend with two other volunteers to include a mixture of reflection time, group discussions, and team building activities. It was a really positive time to get to reflect a little bit about volunteerism and our own personal volunteer experiences, highlights, and struggles, and also to bond together as a group. In just over a month, the July group of new volunteers will come and those who have been here for a year will prepare to leave.
As part of being in the clinic, we receive all the new children who come to the Ranch. Usually they come as a group of siblings and they stay in the clinic for 1 week to be assessed and make sure they are healthy before being placed into their Hogars. It is always interesting to see in what state they come, and their stories are often heartbreaking. Sometimes the children seem a little shell-shocked as they assimilate to the community and culture here on the Ranch, especially if they have come from extreme poverty, to now receiving their own clothes, having their own bed to sleep in, indoor bathrooms, electricity, drinking water, and more. I imagine it is also overwhelming for them to be put into a house with a group of 20 other children roughly their age. As the weeks go on, the kids make friends and learn their way around and the routines here on the ranch and generally do pretty well.
In March, we received a new family to NPH that really touched me and many others. It included 6 children, ages 1 to 12 years old, and their 34 year old mother who was dying of cervical cancer that would have once been operable and treatable, but the family did not have the resources for her to receive treatment. As a result, Juana and her family were brought here so that she could pass away knowing that her children will always be kept together as a family and will be safe and well provided for. The children were all placed in various Hogars, based on their age level, but they came daily to spend time with their mother. The oldest boy, who I admire a lot, sometimes spent the night in the clinic to be near her. He is only 12 and I believe was caring for family before coming here. This was the first time in my life that I had watched somebody actively dying where there was nothing to be done but hospice care. During Jauna’s two months here with us, the clinic staff did their best to pamper her and make her last few days as peaceful and comfortable as possible. Sometimes when I see one of the 6 children I feel sorry for all that they had to go through watching their mother die, but then that quickly melts away when the 7 year old, Marta (who I like to call Martita because she is so tiny), comes running down the sidewalk with her arms wide open and a huge grin on her face, as she careens into me and I give her a great big hug and know that she is in a great place and will grow up to do good things.
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