SAN PEDRO SULA, WASHINGTON, D.C.–A few days ago, the Haven Universe missions team returned home from their third semi-annual mission trip to Honduras. Our team, consisting of two board members CT and Chip Gordon, spent 1/6/2012-1/13/2012 in country working primarily on medical mission projects. The team spent the first three days in Copan Ruinas where it has partnered up with a thriving local church to provide physical and psychiatric medical care to the community. Dr. Gordon spent three days seeing patients averaging approximately 20 patients a day spread between the town of Copan and Las Mesas—a nearby rural mountain top community. During this time, Chip spent time working with a team of engineers who are attempting to address a water quality problem in the Las Mesas community.
After our time in Copan Ruinas, the team drove to Puerto Cortes (a port city in the northern part of Honduras). We spent a day there partnering with a not-for-profit organization called Cocal Gracias which runs a technical school in a suburban neighborhood of Puerto Cortes. The team spent the day networking with Brian Rurak, Executive Director of Cocal Gracias, and his wife, Rina, as well as assisting Cocal Gracias with a drainage problem around their buildings. This meant the manual shoveling of an entire dump truck load of earth. It is the team’s hope that this will help the local community by reducing the amount of stagnate water and thus the mosquito population.
Following the team’s day and night in Puerto Cortes, they headed to San Pedro Sula—the industrial capital of Honduras and second largest city. Haven Universe has partnered with Orphan Helpers, a not-for-profit organization that serves in government run orphanages in San Pedro Sula. The Haven Universe team has been a liaison to the local healthcare community working to establish a multi-disciplinary clinic where children and adolescents from Nueva Esperanza (an orphanage for 0-12 year olds) and Mujeres Adolescentes (a center for abused and abandoned at risk teenage girls) can receive basic medical care from and provide access to sub specialty care as needed (including psychiatry, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, etc). This should result in a huge improvement in the quality of life for the kids. By the end of the trip, basic guidelines for the clinic had been laid out and an implementation plan started. God willing, within the next six weeks, the first girls from Mujeres Adolescentes will be seen in the clinic. The clinic will be held weekly at the local public hospital, Catorina Rivas, in the Pediatrics department. Between three and six patients will be evaluated every week until everyone in both centers has been seen. The Haven Universe team wishes to thank the Honduran medical community for their interest in the project and generosity with their time and resources.
In addition to working on the creation of the multi-disciplinary clinic in San Pedro Sula, the Haven Universe team distributed six months worth of vitamins to each child in Nueva Esperanza and Mujeres Adolescentes. We spent time working in a make shift medical clinic in a local homeless shelter and partnered with a local psychiatrist to consult on cases at Good Samaritan Catholic home for profoundly disabled individuals.
Overall, the trip was extremely successful and bore much fruit. The team plans to return to Honduras June 21-29, 2012 and bring with them a team of approximately fifteen medical professionals, most from Arizona as they partner with H.E.R.O. (Humanitarian Efforts Reaching Out).
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