Cayos Cochinos, Honduras
Today we voyaged to the Cayos Cochinos island group to do a mobile medical clinic among the Garifuna people living on theses scattered, isolated cays. About 150 people, mostly children, live on the Cayos with little or no access to health care except on the mainland–and for most of the inhabitants, making a bare subsistence living fishing and on the few adventure tourists who visit the Cayos, the 14-mile journey to the mainland might as well be a thousand miles away.
We were joined by volunteers from Clinica Esperanza and the Roatan Rotary Club. A dawn departure with beautiful weather for a crossing saw us
reaching the Cayos Cochinos around mid morning. Because the normally east trade winds were reversed, blowing from the Northwest, there was no place we could anchor in shelter, and Southern Wind had to stand off the island while our team went ashore for the clinic.
The local officials were kind enough to use their panga to run us to shore, and we set up on the beach and began to see patients. We saw adults and children, men and women, all suffering the diseases of poverty that we see everywhere there are people living at the subsistence level such as worms, skin diseases and fungus, poorly healed wounds, poor nutrition, anemia, malaria…and we also saw a lot of ear infections since the islanders spend a lot of time diving for food.
It is heartbreaking to see people living their lives with so little support from anywhere, and yet they laugh and smile, and the children play, and when they get sick, they either get better or they don’t, so it was a wonderful experience to bring care directly to their homes. We distributed over 6,000 vitamins, and treated almost all the residents of one of the cays for parasites, and managed to get some health education to the moms on the island. They have little or no access to health knowledge, and we always look for any opportunity to provide health knowledge that can help our patients get better and stay healthier.
Bad weather and a broken mooring line in the middle of the night forced our early return to Roatan, but we will be going back to the Cayos soon to do follow-up on the patients we saw, and to visit the families living on the other cays as well. Our goal is to provide care for every man, woman and child living on the Cayos!