Summer Darkness Brings in Light

In the world of medicine there are not many things about the Covid pandemic that we can feel

truly thankful for-millions dead worldwide, the departure of many medical professionals from

practice, the politicization of a medical crisis, and disruptions in care that we still are trying to

grapple with and recover from. At Cape CARES our clinical work in Honduras was put on hold

as airline travel halted and we hunkered down to control the spread of the infection. Yet as I

reflect on our recent trip to San Marcos, there is one consequence of Covid that I can truthfully

say I appreciate. Upon our return to San Marcos in 2021, we completely reorganized our care

delivery system in terms of clinic flow, triage and the provision of medical care to ensure the

health and safety of the communities we serve. To that end, for the first time, we hired local

people to work as Clinic Assistants, training them in all aspects of clinical work: from triage to

working in the lab, to guiding patients from station to station within the clinic and back out of the clinic grounds. They learned about maintaining social distancing, about masking, about limiting exposures and about how we keep each other safe. They were critical to the success of our work. As the pandemic’s intensity has waned and its acute devastation has lessened, we have maintained our new collaboration with the people of San Marcos. The Clinic Assistants have become a permanent and integral part of our team. A small gift from Covid.

Over these past few years, little by little, we’ve come to know our clinic assistants more

intimately-realizing that Kristina who does all the cleaning and laundering , is the mother of

Milton, a developmentally disabled young man who for years has conversed with us through the

fence by the hand washing pila, asking for a new toothbrush and who we do a check up on

each time we hold a brigade; that Oneyda who has been one of our cooks for literally years, is

married to Hector, one of our Clinic Assistants who with kindness and compassion leads the

elderly through the clinic, his arm linked in theirs; that Xiomara, another of our long term cooks

is married to David who magically turns the clinic’s chaos into an orderly flow of patients from

triage, to the lab, to the provider, all the while keeping his eye out for any patients needing extra

care or attention; that Marley is Xiomara’s sister, and so is Oneyda, that everyone seems to

somehow be related to Juan Carlos our on site coordinator.

On our recent trip to San Marcos, when Juan Carlos had to leave our pre-dawn hike earlier than planned, he asked David to fill in for him, guiding our small hiking group back down the hillside towards the community center. While we walked, he mentioned that his house was along the path and when I inquired if we could walk by it, his quiet response was “Would you like to?”. And in that serendipitous moment, we took a little detour and made a deeper connection with him and his family. He proudly showed us his home, the wall of honor in his living room where Juan Carlos’ picture held the central position, between a painting of Jesus and one of David’s parents. We chatted with his 14 year old daughter as she stirred a pot of beans over an open fire and learned about how their water supply came from a shared water distribution system serving twenty homes. He spoke with pride of how his water was pure and clean, always testing clear of contaminants and told us about how he spends summers building houses in Tegucigalpa to earn money to care for his family. On our last morning of the brigade, he and Xiomara invited the whole brigade up to visit once again. We stood together on his front porch, soaking in the view of rolling hills and fields. On a mountaintop in rural Honduras, in a little village, there we were: co-workers, collaborators, friends, and now perhaps, truly family.

By Mara Saulitis