Sometimes it is amazing to see what we can do just by having a “half walker”, a committed volunteer and a series of events that had to happen at the exact right time. Coincidences or not, the story that unfolds is music to our ears. Jose Antonio, a young man of forty-nine, had a stroke on the job and lost movement on his left side. Confined to a wheelchair, he had not walked since the day of his stroke three months prior.
HER SMILE IS WORTH IT ALL. When seeing Maria Francis so happy, enjoying her mother´s dance, we know that we´ve done something right for her and her family. With six children in her family, she and her siblings haven´t had it easy: there is little food on their table and almost no money left over for clothing or transportation. Surgery to correct her cleft lip and palate deformity was simply an unreachable dream.
SANTA ROSA DE COPAN, HONDURAS — Mark Gorman is sitting in a small room, made smaller by the stacks of containers that line two walls. He is rummaging around, looking for just the right piece of strap to adapt a plastic boot that straps to the leg of a young man named Jose, who has had his foot amputated. The prosthetic, which Jose got earlier this week, doesn’t fit comfortably in his shoe. There are muscles that connect to the heel, Gorman explained, and muscles that connect to the forefoot…Source: www.the-daily-record.com
CORQUIN de COPAN, HONDURAS — Juan Bobo is a pretty popular guy in this school in the Honduran mountains.
A folkloric character from Puerto Rico, Juan Bobo — a boy who never seems to do anything right but always comes through with a lesson at the end — is the subject of endless books in both English and Spanish…Source: www.the-daily-record.com
SANTA ROSA DE COPAN, HONDURAS — Alex is being released today from Hospital de Occidente. But right now, he’s lying on a bed in the men’s surgical ward, where 22 beds sometimes are filled with 30 patients or more, some two per single bed. They come for a variety of reasons, everything appendicitis to pancreatitis, from burns to car accidents to gunshot wounds. And for more than a dozen years this ward — with no air conditioning and just one common bathroom — has been tended to by head nurse Doris Ramirez…Source: www.the-daily-record.com
SANTA ROSA de COPAN, HONDURAS — There was a bus accident not too long ago on one of the main roads leading to Santa Rosa. This in and of itself is not unusual. The emergency department at Hospital de Occidente sees all manner of people — including children — from bus accidents, from car accidents, from falls from the beds of trucks, where it is not unusual for up to 10 people to be riding both sitting down and standing up. But, according to Hannah Loder, an EMT and emergency department nurses’ assistant currently living in Zanesville, what happened as a result of this particular accident would have been preventable, had the local fire department had the right equipment and the protocols to use it…Source: www.the-daily-record.com
Daily Record reporter Tami Mosser spent time in Honduras with CAMO and gives a peek into the lives and living conditions there.Source: www.the-daily-record.com
SANTA ROSA de COPAN, HONDURAS — They assemble every morning at 6 to share breakfast, a quick devotion and the day’s announcements at a hotel in the center of the oldest section of Santa Rosa, a bustling city of 60,000 in the mountains of western Honduras.
And then it’s off to work for the day for the two dozen medical professionals and support staff in the city this week to volunteer with the Orrville-based Central American Medical Outreach …Source: www.the-daily-record.com
SANTA ROSA de COPAN, HONDURAS — Even though a nurse promised her “no shots and no ouchies today,” Maria Francis was crying. She sat on her mother’s lap, repeatedly turning her face away from everyone trying to talk to her, to tell her how pretty she looked. And one hand — sometimes both — stayed clamped over her mouth. The 12-year-old was the first patient of the day to be seen by Columbus pediatric plastic surgeon Dr. Greg Pearson, who was working from a small exam room in a consultation building right behind Hospital de Occidente, the largest such public facility in western Honduras …Source: www.the-daily-record.com
CONCEPCION, HONDURAS — Rene Madrid was living in a small one-room shack, no larger than a single-car garage, with no water, no bathroom, no kitchen, no food and no hope. Madrid, who is 53 but looks much older, is a paraplegic. He fell, he said through an interpreter, “working on the side of a mountain.” Most likely, this was a result of working on a coffee farm, where the plants grow on steeply sloped mountains. Madrid lives in Concepcion, a village of just 83 in the Intibuca district of Honduras …Source: www.the-daily-record.com
