Some time ago, the mayor of Comayagua invited several representatives of the Society of the Good Shepherd to meet with him and several doctors at his office. The mayor and the doctors told the Society about an important need at the health clinic in one of the poorer areas of the city known as Colonia Morazan. Comayagua is a city of 120,000 people, divided into several sections known as colonias. Although there is a hospital in Comayagua, each colonia has a public health clinic that can meet many of the health needs of the people who live in that colonia.
Among other things, the Colonia Morazan clinic specializes in tuberculosis. However, it also treats general health needs. When the clinic was originally built, it was sufficiently large for the colonia’s needs. However, as the population burgeoned, the number of patients eventually outgrew the small waiting room inside the clinic.
At community health clinics like this one, the patients are not allowed to make advance appointments. Instead, patients are seen on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. So if a person wants to see a doctor on a given day, they must arrive early and be prepared to wait for several hours. Those who arrive later in the day may not be able to see a doctor at all. So typically, at the Morazan clinic, patients begin arriving around 6:00 a.m. or earlier and then line up outside the front door of the clinic. The clinic opens at 7:00 a.m. each morning. However, the waiting area inside is too small to accommodate the large number of patients the clinic now sees each day.
This was the problem the mayor wanted to speak with us about. Throughout the day, a large line of patients would extend out the door of the clinic onto the dirt yard outside. I say, “dirt,” but six months of the year it is mud. That is how long the rainy season lasts each year. So for half the year, the sick patients would have to stand outside in the rain for hours in order to see a doctor. This was not healthy for the patients and often made them worse. During the other half of the year, the patients would bake in the merciless tropical sun. Furthermore, the situation encouraged overcrowding of the small interior waiting area, packing together patients with communicable diseases.
Accordingly, the mayor and doctors asked the Society if we would be willing to build an extended waiting area for the clinic. After talking with the mayor, we said that we wanted to see the situation at the clinic firsthand. So we drove over to the clinic with two doctors to examine the problem. Here we were able to witness the obviously inadequate waiting area and the suffering this was causing the patients. We also saw why, on rainy days, some patients would return home in worse condition than when they arrived at the clinic.
We spent more than an hour at the clinic, while the doctors discussed with us potential ways to build an additional waiting area at minimal cost. We told them that we were interested in taking on the project, but that we would need to do some further analysis of the situation. We also explained that we already had some construction projects underway that we would need to finish first.
Meanwhile, the Society met with a construction engineer, Juan Martinez, who is also a Christian brother. Juan came up with a proposal to add an enlarged covered waiting area to the building that would be open on two sides. This would protect the patients from the elements while providing plenty of fresh air ventilation for cooling and to help minimize the spread of disease from patient to patient. (Cold temperatures are never a problem in Comayagua!)
A few months ago, we began construction on this extended waiting room. We completed it by early summer, just as the rainy season was beginning. So the new waiting room has already been a huge blessing to the people in Colonia Morazan. The amazing thing is that we were able to complete the project for only $9020! For a relatively small amount of Kingdom money, this will alleviate an enormous amount of suffering endured by the poor.
When brother Juan had finished installing the metal beams for the roof, he found he had some metal left over. So he was able to construct some metal benches out of them, to provide additional seating for the new waiting room.
While we were working on the waiting room, we also learned of another acute need at the clinic. The wooden shelving units that hold around 80,000 patient files had been eaten to pieces by termites and were largely unusable. Many of these important files were now in cardboard boxes, sitting on chairs. As a result, the whole filing system was in disarray. So brother Juan used the remaining metal left over from the beams to construct metal shelves to hold the files. Being made of metal, these shelves will be termite-proof.
These projects for the Morazan clinic are just another way that we, as Kingdom people, can share Christ’s love with the poor of this world and help to alleviate suffering. Thank all of you who made this project possible.
Julie Nyhoff de Valladares
The Society of the Good Shepherd, P. O. Box 122, Amberson, PA 17210 • (717) 349-7033
Click on the following link if you would care to make a donation to the work in Honduras: Honduras Donations