These are photos from the medical brigade and surrounding community, and I hope none appears twice. The man in the tree is helping put up our radio antenna. One photo shows me with a boy whom I took years ago as a PC volunteer to a lip/palate brigade. Imagine my surprise when his father called me "Dona Barbara" and thanked me for helping his son live a normal life. Although there were some large families, most were not as large as they were a few years ago. As usual, our dentists could only clean and pull teeth, not fill them without electricity for a drill. In addition to brigade theme-photos, you see village life, includuing card playing, coffee picking a processing, soccer, and our cook preparing our meals over a wood stove. An Esperanza Red Cross volunteer helping us had a birthday and is shown with her cake. As you can see, people are willing to wait to see us and we tend to hundreds of patients all told. It's satisfying, which why I keep going back. IHS works all over Honduras on a year-round basis, but I always come back to the Esperanza area of the extended year of Peace Corps experience and the "Hope" of my book title. Each year, we go to different villages to spread our serivces around. Readers, espeically physicians, nurses, dentists, and pharmacists, are invited to join us, but must pay their own way and an extra amount for expenses and supplies. IHS is non-partisan, non-denominational, and has no paid staff or overhead and although the official name is International Health Service of Minnesota, its volunteers come from all over the US and Canada and even sometimes from Latin America.
It's very tedious to upload these photos, so I do hope someone is looking at them. The times of posting shown are west coast time and you can see the interval between posts. Two more to go after this, San Felipe Hospital and the residential school for the blind, both in Teguc.
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