I feel as though I have been transported back to Washington state as I sit on my bed and look out my window at our courtyard garden and watch the fine misty rain dance about in the air. Instead of the short bursts of down pours that the previous months held, it is now a little grayer, a little cooler, and the rain is a little more drawn out. Never the less, there is laughter and joyful voices of tiny children out my other window as they play on the squeaky swing-set equipment across the way, and I feel at home. This month I sat down to write a volunteer testimony for our Home Correspondent and the NPH website to help give donors and future volunteers a better idea of what the volunteer experience is all about. I would like to share some of the insights I came up with as I tried to reflect upon my 10 months in Honduras thus far.
I often forget how different my life is here compared to back home. A change that might be more noticeable returning back to the USA in a few months than it was originally coming to Honduras. But right now, it is just life. I walk almost a mile to and from work each day. This walk I often enjoy as a time to think and enjoy the beautiful 7am misty view of the fields and mountains around me. In the afternoon, the joy of the walk depends largely on the temperature of the day. As most of you know, prior to coming here to Honduras, I had a wonderful job at a fabulous Children’s Hospital. The clinic here is a stark contrast from the state-of-the-art hospital I previously worked in where I had all the newest technologies and best resources at my fingertips. I spend two hours each morning doing vital signs in a room that doesn’t have light (the light bulb only turns on when it wants to) apart from the daylight that enters through the windows. We have no drinking water and most days recently, no other running water either. Friday I had to take my instruments outback to the spicket to clean them with the brown water outside. Our roof leaks terribly, and every day before I leave I have to remember to cover up all the important desk supplies with a water-resistant cloth, and hide the important papers in the drawers. Occasionally we have a bat that likes to visit and hangout on the ceiling. But we make progress slowly, and benefit from the love and support of others. This month I received a wonderful donation of thermometers, stethoscopes, and glucometers from Dr. Tammy Chelsy who had visited and volunteered at our clinic for a week in July and gathered donations to meet some of our needs.
I have had to adapt to the lack of conveniences, and in many ways become much more resourceful. I have learned to do many things by hand, such as sterilize equipment, make cotton balls, and bag and label medications. Here my scope of practice is very wide and I wear many hats. I am not only a nurse, but also janitor, maintenance, secretary, administrator, supervisor, and pharmacist. I do everything from sweeping and mopping to filling medication prescriptions and educating patients about their health and wellness. Life is never dull here. I have helped deliver a baby in the back of a pick-up truck, twice, tended to many machete wounds, and careened down the windy road toward the Tegucigalpa hospital in the back of a minibus converted to ambulance. It’s great… I often wonder what it will be like for me to readjust back to an acute care hospital setting in the US where I am strictly a nurse with lots of rules, guidelines, protocols and policies to follow.
One of my highlights this month was getting the opportunity to visit the home of one of our volunteer surgeons who performs minor surgeries for some of our patients every couple weeks. He has a passion for chocolate and raises his own cocoa plants in the highlands north of here. His home however was just close enough to take a fun day trip, in which we helped us to make chocolate from scratch. We started with the fermented cocoa beans, roasted and shelled them. Ground them up until it looked like coffee grounds, and then put them into his special mixing machine with milk, butter, and passion fruit flavoring. In addition to the delicious chocolate that we got to eat, Dr. Cerna was an excellent host and we enjoyed a day of beautiful views and fresh air at his home set up in the mountains above Tegucigalpa.
Mid-October we had our second staff retreat of the year and headed south to an island called Amapala, off the pacific coast of Honduras. It is a lush, jungle island with a 783 meter inactive volcano peaking in the middle. The staff retreats are always a lot of fun, especially since half the volunteers work opposite weekends, so there is some staff that I never get to travel with otherwise. Unfortunately we timed our trip just a tropical storm was cruising its way up the pacific coast. It rained in spurts about every 10 minutes, and when we did finally make it to the beach, we went swimming in a torrential downpour. I guess we were wet anyway, and we had warm coffee waiting for us when we got out.
Lastly, a moment from Hogar. There is one girl in my hogar who is a year or two older than the rest, and as many of the older kids here go, it takes a while to earn their respect and trust. They see many visitors and staff come and go in their lives, especially the volunteers who are only here for a year. It seems like a long time to us who uproot our lives back home and leave our family and friends, but really to the kids we are present for just a small fraction of their lives on the Ranch. Anyway, when I first came into the hogar in February, we both definitely rubbed each other the wrong way, and she barely spoke to me for the first several months. Then, if I did get her attention long enough to say something, it was usually followed by a drawn out eye-rolling. Over the past several months I have finally been able to break down that barrier with a lot of the girls, and little by little, with this one in particular. Then last week, unexpectedly, she came up to me, wrapped her arms around my wait, looked up at me and said “Heder, I love you! When you leave I am going to cry a lot.” These genuine words were so unexpected and surprising coming from her mouth, that all I could do was smile and think about how much I will miss each one of my girls as well.
Heather, your story from the Hogar made me tear up!
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