Honduras
I traveled to Honduras on June 13th, 2010 with the UC Davis medical brigade to provide medical and dental care to rural villages. Along with our 24 students from UC Davis, we were joined by the brigade from UC Riverside, as well as four Physician Assistant students, three doctors, one pharmacist and one nurse . Our brigade completed three visits to separate villages in Honduras over the course of three days, treating about 1,300 patients in total.
Day 1
At 5:00 pm on Saturday I headed off to San Francisco from Davis. There was traffic so I arrived at a friend’s house at around 7:30 pm. A massive amount of medicine awaited packing and we spent over an hour stuffing vitamins and drugs into 10 suitcases.
After pizza and watching Toy Story, we headed off to the airport. In total, there were 25 of us leaving for Honduras that would be representing UC Davis, including one person from UC San Diego and a nurse from Washington.
Our flight was at 1:22 am with TACA airlines. Unfortunately, I was stuck flying in the uncomfortable middle seat for the whole five and a half hours.
Day 2
Early in the morning, our plane landed in San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador. From my experiences in China, I’d say this is one of the jankier airports I’ve been to. The runway, for instance, was lined with overgrown weeds and broken down shacks, though the interior of the airport wasn’t too bad.
Outside the airport at San Salvador.
Another shot outside the airport.
Inside the airport. 
A delicious six dollar sandwich.
An interesting fact about El Salvador is that the entire country switched over to the U.S. Dollar in 2001, so buying what we wanted at the airport was pretty easy, though unfortunately prices were comparable to the U.S. There was also a Subway in the airport that did not taste like the Subways in America. We spent about five hours in San Salvador waiting for our plane to Tegucigalpa (the capital of Honduras), which arrived at 2:00 pm. The flight from San Salvador to Tegucigalpa wasn’t actually that long, only ~45 minutes since the two countries are practically right next door.
Our old school propeller plane – we had to walk up to it on the airfield in order to board.
It was my first time in a propeller plane, but it wasn’t as bumpy as I expected.
Flying over Tegucigalpa.
Close to the ground. 
From the sky it was easy to spot the gap between the rich and poor in Honduras as some houses sported swimming pools while other much smaller houses were packed so close they looked like fish scales along the hills. The airport landing strip was positioned in a kind of valley with houses plopped above both sides of the valley, so it was a bit unnerving to be in a plane flying so close to a residential area.
After landing, customs was quick and straightforward, though our group had about 30 pieces of luggage we needed to pick up. The airport at Tegucigalpa was actually much nicer than I expected and certainly a step up from what we experienced in San Salvador (though this may be the case due to the fact that Honduras is a much larger country than El Salvador). We exited the airport and were greeted with the sight of familiar American fast food:
Outside Tegucigalpa Airport.
For our enormous amount of luggage.
Houses just outside Tegucigalpa.
We boarded a bus that took us about two hours outside the capital city to a community called Nuevo Paraiso run by the Sociedad Amigos de los Niños. The Sociedad Amigos de los Niños is an organization that provides food and shelter to impoverished women and children in Honduras, and Nuevo Paraiso was one of the villages they run. Groups from other schools such as the UCLA medical brigade also stayed at Nuevo Paraiso, along with other types of brigades such as the construction brigades that built homes for the village. We stayed in an abandoned clinic converted to house groups like ours.
The five of us guys shared a room, which was surprisingly nice. We had air conditioning, a toilet and shower, as well as a housekeeper who took out the trash and made the beds each day. We had dinner at 6:00 pm, which was also surprisingly good.
After dinner the electricity went out and everyone was tired from the trip so we all went to bed at around 9:30 pm. One thing about Honduras is that it gets dark very early at around 6:00 pm during the summer, so it always feels later in the day than it really is.
Day 3
We woke up early for breakfast at 6:30 am in which we had eggs, tortillas, beans, juice and coffee, which is more than what I eat for breakfast back at home! After breakfast we began unpacking medicine and repacking them into zip-lock bags for easier distribution. We looked pretty shady, with all of us wearing gloves and counting pills.
Around noon we took a break from our packing and met the little kids in the elementary school next door to our clinic. The kids were really cool but unfortunately I couldn’t understand anything they said.
Lunch was a delicious slice of pork with rice, tortillas and watermelon. All our meals are buffet style with plenty of juice, fruit and tortillas. I felt a little uncomfortable for eating so well while most Hondurans in the village probably ate much worse than we did.
After lunch we were back to packing. We had a whole suitcase full of vitamins that needed to be separated into bags of 30 – fun times.
At around 3:00 pm we were taken out to a tour of Flor Azul, a kind of camp for impoverished boys that was within our village. We joined up with the medical brigade from UCLA and played soccer with the kids from Flor Azul. There was one boy we met in the camp named Agua who drank out everyone’s water bottle while we were playing soccer.
My adopted kid and another guy from UCLA.
At dinner, we met up with the brigade from UC Riverside, which shared the clinic with our brigade.
Dinner.
Day 4
Today was our first “brigade”, a term used to describe when our group drives out to another community to treat the
villagers. In our case we combined our group with UC Riverside’s group into one brigade since both our groups were pretty small. We also teamed up with a group of Honduran girls who would perform presentations as part of our brigade.
We awoke at 6:30 am for breakfast and packed into two buses with all our medication. We drove to a village called Jalaca, about an hour and a half away from our clinic. On the way there I noticed a lot of posters plastered on houses that advertised Coke products. Each bottle costs 18 Lempiras, probably as much as a typical Honduran makes in a day.
At the site there was already a large crowd of villagers waiting for us, mostly elderly people. We set up in an elementary school of four rooms. We had our first room as our triage area, the second room where the doctors worked, the third room with presentations and the fourth room with the pharmacy. The patients were supposed to be first triaged, then shown to the doctors. After meeting with a doctor, they would attend a presentation while we fetched medication for them in the pharmacy.
Medication ready to be distributed.
The prescriptions sheets we filled.
I worked in the pharmacy in the morning and it got pretty hot in the room from the 14 of us all grabbing medicine. It rained from time to time, though it didn’t seem to cool the room down much. It was also my first time communicating in Spanish and I definitely messed up on explaining the instructions for the medicine more than once. We generally gave out Tylenol, Advil, cough medicine and vitamins. 
Security.
For lunch we had this kind of wrap with chicken and hot sauce in it.
After lunch we continued to fill prescriptions until the line of patients shrunk at around 3:00 pm; we saw a total of about 480 patients that day.
Tonight was the night before the Hondura vs. Chile game so the staff at the clinic celebrated by decorating the place with Honduran stuff and had a party. I bought a Honduran soccer jersey ($15) and a shot glass ($5).
Day 5
We started at 7:00 am for breakfast and left for a village called Joyas del Carballo. The main road was flooded from rains so we took an alternate route through the mountains that took about two a half hours. At point in the mountains the other bus couldn’t get up the hill so everyone had to get out of the bus. The village itself had a very beautiful view.
I got to work in the triage room in the morning and I paired up with a Spanish speaker. He asked all the questions and I measured things like temperature, blood pressure and weight.
After lunch I was back to the pharmacy.
We finished around 4 pm after seeing about 430 patients for the day and headed back. It was pretty stormy by the time we neared our compound.
We played packed some more medicine and played mafia that night.
Day 6
Today was our last brigade, in a village called Valle Arriba. The drive there was very short (about 45 min).
The elementary school where we worked.
The last day was a bit disappointing since there weren’t as many patients that needed to be seen as the past two days. I spent the morning in our tiny pharmacy room and after lunch I shadowed a doctor. A lot of patients unfortunately had symptoms that our limited selection of medicine couldn’t treat. We ended up referring a lot of people for x-rays and other tests in the big hospitals in Tegucigalpa, but I couldn’t see how many of them could even get to the capital.
At the end of the day we ended up with way more medicine that we brought than we needed. We saw a total of 230 patients plus 30 dental patients.
Group picture with Riverside and GMB staff.
Our last dinner in Nuevo Paraiso – banana chips, salsa and breaded fish.
The GMB staff threw a party for us since it was our last day, though we still had to pay for our own drinks.
Day 7
It was UC Davis’s last day in Honduras, though UC Riverside was planned to stay another day.
We packed up and left at 8:30 am to visit a tourist town to buy souvenirs. I bought a machete and and some souvenir liquor bottles for my dad.
Lunch – most places accepted the dollar.
Our flight at Tegucigalpa to San Salvador was at 5:10 pm. I noticed that as we drove into Tegucigalpa, their public transportation was made up of a fleet of yellow school buses – some of them still had the American “School Bus” markings on them.
Another shot of Tegucigalpa streets.
My last meal in Honduras – Mcdonalds!
The security at the airport was surprisingly loose, they let me take on board two bottles of liquids!
About to takeoff from Tegucigalpa Airport.
On the flight back to San Salvador we were in a jet plane that even had touch screen TV’s in front of each seat, a far cry from the propeller plane we took from San Salvador to Tegucigalpa.
Leaving Tegucigalpa.
The El Salvador coast – surprisingly straight.
We had a short layover of one hour in San Salvador, then we boarded our flight back to San Francisco. Unfortunately, our plane from San Salvador to San Francisco wasn’t even equipped with individual TV screens.




























































