Next Stop, Honduras!

Hello folks!

My Guatemala internship wrapped up very nicely with a weekend trip to Lake Atitlan, one of the most beautiful places in the world. I met up with Fernando and Jos at San Pedro, a popular town along the lake where we ate lots of delicious non-Guatemalan food, watched Euro Cup soccer, and did some serious relaxing. It was a wonderful weekend although I was sad to say goodbye to Jos and Fer.

Lake Atitlan

The office threw me a really lovely despedida (going-away party) on my last day of work where everyone brought in some kind of typical Guatemalan food to share for lunch. The highlights were tamales, guacamole, chiles rellenos, taquitos, refried beans and tortillas. I was so touched and surprised by the gesture and their kind words during the lunch. My plan is to stay in touch with the organization’s director to potentially continue working there next summer.

With Sonia, the organization's director (who also kindly housed me during my trip)

I flew home on June 15^th for a nice 10-day respite in North Carolina. I tried to make the most out of my time at home, finishing another draft of my Guatemala paper and getting ready for the Honduras trip, but I still had plenty of time for fun summer things like lying by the pool, eating barbecue, catching up on HBO shows, and sitting on the front porch with Patrick (a lot).

I left yesterday for a three-week trip to Honduras through a UNC organization called the Honduran Health Alliance (HHA). HHA is a student-run organization working to eliminate cervical cancer and create knowledge about and access to family planning resources in the developing world. Here’s the website if you’re curious: www.med.unc.edu/hha/

Each summer, a group of medical students spends three weeks in rural Honduras leading health education workshops for the local women. Supervised by UNC physicians, students also organize and run a week-long clinic for women, providing cervical cancer screening, family planning counseling and resources, and STI screening and treatment. My good friend Erin and I are this year’s public health leaders, and our role is to train the medical students in health education, facilitate educational sessions with Honduran women, help with clinic intake, and lead a training conference with local health promoters at the end of the trip.

I am also really excited because I have the opportunity to lead a qualitative study while I’m here to examine barriers and facilitators to contraceptive use as well as the role of men in reproductive decision-making. Five people on the trip have volunteered to help me with focus groups and interviews, and our plan is to conduct one focus group with men, one with women, and about 18-20 in-depth interviews with both men and women. It’s a lot to take on for a quick trip but hopefully we can pull it off! I will analyze and write about the data through a class I’m taking in the fall.

So far, everything has been going smoothly and I love the group! There are four leaders (two 4^th year med students and me and Erin), six rising 2^nd year med students, and five 4^th year med students. In about a week, we’ll be joined by three attending physicians who will help during our clinic week. We spent last night in Tegucigalpa and in a couple of hours will make the four-hour trip to el Corpus, the town that will be our home-base for the next three weeks. El Corpus is in the Department of Choluteca, close to the Southern border with Nicaragua. We’ll stay with host families there for most of the trip, but later this week, we’ll disperse to six rural communities near el Corpus to spend three days leading health education sessions with women about family planning, STIs, nutrition, and domestic violence. We’ll also help local health promoters publicize the clinic and encourage community members to attend.

I’m not sure what the internet situation will be like in el Corpus but I’ll try to post another couple of times before the trip is over!