Help for Honduras: The Story
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As their yellow school bus crawled up the Honduran mountainside, the passengers could see the line from a half mile away.
Outside the walls of a school, more than 400 people had gathered on this early Tuesday morning. Many of them were children. Many of them were suffering from scabies, lice, or neglected wounds. All of them were suffering from a general lack of medical care.
Photo courtesy of Compassion Med International
Hundreds of people wait in line for the relief team at Los Pinos.
The place they called home, Los Pinos, is an impoverished community that largely did not exist until 1998, when Hurricane Mitch devastated the nearby Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa and turned this area into a refuge for about 10,000 displaced people. Los Pinos did not have the infrastructure to support its new residents, and even now, more than a decade later, it still does not have running water, sewer, or proper septic systems.
This was not the typical destination for a busload of college students on spring break, but for 11 second-year students from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, spring break 2009 was anything but your typical fun-in-the-sun getaway.
The students were part of a medical relief mission from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The group, consisted of students, faculty, and volunteers, provided aid to underserved communities in and around Tegucigalpa from March 5 to 13. They treated more than 1,700 people, distributed about a ton of medical supplies, delivered food to more than thirty-five needy families, and provided school supplies, book bags, clothes, and toys to hundreds of children.
“This is something I wanted to do before I got to pharmacy school,” says Yunji Kim, one of the pharmacy students who went on the trip. “I was just glad that there was an opportunity for us to do it.”
“They need me down there”
Honduras is the third poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean, with more than half of its people living in poverty. In the rural areas, where more than 50 percent of Hondurans reside, about a quarter of the population has no access to safe drinking water and 45 percent lack adequate sanitation facilities.
“The division between the haves and have-nots is very striking,” says Christine Walko, PharmD, an assistant professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy who went on the mission as a volunteer pharmacist. “You would have the large president’s house right next to a tiny little shack. They do have a mall. They do have prosperous sections, but it’s just odd because it’s interspersed with these very, very poor areas that don’t even have running water.”