Honduras 2002

Witness For Peace
Honduras Delegation
March 31st – April 13th, 2002

By Kristin Schwarz

On the night of April 6th, a small life was saved. In the fishing village of Guapinol, on the coast of the beautiful impoverished Gulf of Fonseca, a tiny baby was brought back to life from the very brink of death. The baby was brought into our clinic that afternoon, in the arms of her young mother, very weak and severely dehydrated with her eyes rolled back into the sockets to reveal only the white conjunctiva. Carefully and slowly, the precious child was given water in tiny increments and after a few tension-filled hours, the girl regained consciousness and, miraculously, stayed awake.

This marks the fifth medical delegation to Honduras from Witness for Peace. The idea for a medical delegation began with Dr. Félix Aguilar in 1998 in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, which destroyed 60 percent of the country. Aguilar is a Honduran-American doctor and a faculty member of the University of California - Irvine College of Medicine. As Dr. Aguilar retains many strong ties to Honduras and much of his family still lives in Tegucigalpa, Hurricane Mitch was a personal as well as a national tragedy. He quickly mobilized, and organized a small group of physicians to provide medical assistance to the hurricane victims. Witness for Peace, which had never before had a medical delegation, provided financial and organizational assistance for this special disaster relief effort.

This first group anticipated treating mostly trauma injuries: broken bones, crushing injuries from flying debris and infections due to the unsanitary conditions. What they found surprised them. Instead of broken bones, the physicians found mostly chronic disease- common problems that had gone untreated for years. The health problems of Honduras were more a result of years of poor medical care and less directly related to the after effects of Hurricane Mitch. The patients that they saw begged them to return soon, and within a month a second delegation came to the region, starting an annual tradition that has continued to 2002. “With each delegation, I think to myself, ‘this is my last trip. This is simply too much work.’” says Aguilar, “And then as soon as I return to the States I say, ‘So when are we going back?’”

This fifth delegation to Honduras was composed of a mixture of medical students and physicians. The group of nineteen was a symbol of American diversity. Although most of the delegates were affiliated with the UCLA School of Medicine, the group was a true melting pot of race, creed, gender, age, and birthplace.

The delegation prepared for eight days of clinic, two in the poorest areas of Tegucigalpa and six in the Gulf of Fonseca region. In these eight clinic days, the group saw and treated over 2,100 patients. Joining medical practice with the pedagogy of Witness for Peace, the group sought to accompany the Honduran people and partner with them to create better health for their communities. Clinic days were an exchange of information- the Americans sharing medical knowledge, the Hondurans sharing their lives and their experience.

While there was a handful of exotic medical problems that were treated in the clinics, by far the most common presenting complaint was pain. Headaches, body aches, and stomachaches - the Hondurans described the pain of life, the pain of poverty. In addition, more than any pill or medication, their greatest desire was to be heard, to tell their story about the hurts that they endured every day without relief. Additionally, malnutrition ran rampant throughout the communities, coupled with intestinal parasites in the children.

Every day, clinic revealed some small successes- the removal of a painful cyst from a man’s hand, the successful treatment of a child’s asthma. The group also encountered daily frustration, as we found ourselves giving metaphorical Band-Aids when the real answer was heart surgery. We could not help but think what would happen when the medications ran out and the health problems remained. There was also great frustration that there was no medication that we could prescribe to treat the most basic problems of the people – the woman whose house burned down, the families who had no money for nutritious food, the couple whose 15 year old son had been killed by thieves, the man who wanted more than anything for his handicapped boy to have the opportunities afforded a child in the United States.

Before the start of clinics, the delegation was able to gain some insight into the current sociopolitical situation in Honduras through the eyes of some of the country’s leaders in the fight against injustice. The group met with Dr. Juan Almendares, former dean of the national medical school in Tegucigalpa, who discussed not only the health problems of Honduras but also the blatant violations of human rights that occur on a daily basis. He discussed the new policy of zero tolerance that has been used by the police force to combat gang violence. While the problem of crime and delinquency is a major problem for the Honduran people, the zero tolerance policy has allowed the police and the military forces to freely execute approximately 2,000 young men between the ages of 10 and 21 in recent years, without any accountability for their actions. According to Almendares, these police forces are known as death squads and demonstrate far more violent disregard for human life than do the gangs that they are supposedly working to eliminate.

Almendares further described the atrocities committed by the privatized army in their treatment of the indigenous peoples of Honduras, including the Lenca Indians. Most recently, he described how the military forcibly removed an entire village from their homes so that the land could be utilized by the mining industry. The mining industry has blossomed in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, bringing in large profits for the Canadian and American companies, which have initiated the mining effort, but at the cost of the environment and the human rights of the indigenous people of Honduras.

In addition, the delegation had the opportunity to visit the National Commission for Human Rights, where they met with Dr. Ramón Custodio and Judge Ana Pineda. They reiterated the problem of military violence against the Honduran youth, and stressed that an ineffective judicial system and too little police and military accountability exacerbate the problem.

The group had the privilege of meeting with Jorge Varela, the executive director of a Honduran environmentalist organization known as CODDEFFAGOLF, which seeks to protect the lands of the Gulf of Fonseca region from the destruction of neo-liberalized industry of recent years, most notably the shrimp farming industry. Varela showed slides and spoke plainly about the environmental devastation that has occurred because of shrimp farming, funded in large part by loans from the World Bank. He also spoke of the effects that shrimp farming has had on the local people of the Gulf of Fonseca, one of the poorest regions in the country. As the shrimp farms destroy the environment of the surrounding area, hardest hit are the local fisherfolk whose income dies along with the fish.

On the night of April 6th, a small life was saved. It was a miracle and a victory for our small delegation, but it should not obscure the larger problems, which remain for the Honduran communities that we left behind: desperate poverty; malnutrition; lack of reliable health care; violent crime with no political recourse. These are the most pressing concerns of the people we saw, far more prevalent than the simple aches and pains that presented themselves to our clinics… and far more difficult to treat.

Witness for Peace

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