DOERS October’s trip for Honduras and statistics
⊆ December 29th, 2011 | ≡ Topic: Honduras, Trips, Uncategorized | | ˜ Comments Off
Phil came home from Iraq where he was doing top-secret Rambo missions. Then he put all the life saving medicine that we got from Kingsway Charities into plastic bins but not before photographing the labels to glean all the information. Then Phil drove me to Chicago; it kind of set the trip Phil, Rob, truck, Infowars, supplies, long long roads and sometimes donuts. The glorious hospitality of our family in Illinois was a blessing and playing with the kids there prepared us for lifting the many boxes to come.
Our most important partner is Cristo Salva Pat Havener. She is a special hero and has taught us lots of things. She, her husband Gary, and Jenn O’Brien let us stay at their house which was home base. At the start of the trip an important thing was helping organize the clinic pharmacy and bodega. Within the bodega was the pyriamid of prenatals which was still a very large pile. The boat was coming with more and so we had to get them to the women.
It rained relentlessly, but Phil drove fast. Pickup load after pickup load of supplies found there way into the hands of doctors, nurses, health workers and administrators. Eventually because a lot of organizations are headquartered in the capital, Tegucigalpa, the trip degenerated into countless returns (four) to that wretched city, but when the dust settled the prenatals were gone; except for one box…
We got out roughly $160,000 worth of supplies. This includes 58,000 doses of deworming medicine which is three times more than we’d ever done in a trip, but still not enough… parasites! We did ~3.2 million prenatals which is as much as all the prenatals that we’ve distributed in the previous nearly three years combined times five! It took over two years to help the first thousand pregnancies, and then it took less than a year to help the next 10,000. I still need to compile the list of everything with all the partners, but for example the stuff we got to Casa Aurora was staggering; just to list it is pages long. New organizations that we worked with are MAMA Project, USAID and Catholic Relief Services. I will write a separate Kinderfeeding update, but ultimately, though indirectly, the trip will have benefited over 50,000 people maybe 70,000 (considering that with albendazole it’s easy to help lots of people.) Not to overstate our role; we’re an intermediary niche of bigger things.
It cost DOERS roughly $2,000 for medicine and $2,000 for the truck which makes for a favorable cost benefit analysis. However, it was more than we had and DOERS is currently in the red, broke, wiped out. But with all the gloom, dire urgency and neverending struggle of the charity I’m still glad we helped all those women. Actually, really really glad and thankful! We completed 10,000 Healthy Baby Campaign! DOERS mission is to help kids grow up healthy and strong, and so I think it’s like a public health project. To guage success quantitatively October 2011 trip was the most successful trip ever. See we have this network of partners now that’s good, and if you look at the catch areas of everyone then the percentage of Honduras that we can cover is growing. Also our ability to get supplies has improved so those two things are pretty valuable.
The network of partners reaches >120 health centers, 10 clinics off the top of my head, 3 hospitals, feeding centers, 32 Peace Corps volunteers. There are 25 births per 1,000 people in Honduras a year. Given a population of 8 million then there are 200,000 births in the whole country. Given prenatals for 10,000 women that covers ~5% of the total. On average there will be 10,000 births in a catchment area 400,000 people. I think that all the people we know serve more than 400,000 people so our capacity is that we can reach more women. I think the new goal should be all of them.
I hope everyone is having a beautiful day. Here are some pictures from the trip, I picked ones that were indicative–truck and boxes:
Love,
Rob
December 29th, 2011
Topic: Honduras, Trips, Uncategorized Tags: None
