HOPE Volunteers Begin Work in Nicaragua

Project HOPE hit the ground running in Corinto, Nicaragua after a one-day transit from El Salvador. Elie Malloy and Diane Speranza headed to the most remote site Continuing Promise has set up so far—far enough from the ship that they’ll remain there tonight and the next two days in order to make the logistics feasible. (To be honest, I’m a bit glad I can’t reasonably make it all the way out there—it is hot enough in the town of Somotillo, away from the coast, that the locals say its “where the Devil takes vacation.”)

At the closer of the two remote sites, in the nearby village of Chinandega, Dr. Ken Iserson and HOPE’s pediatric nurse practitioner, Faye Pyles, charged in to begin administering primary care to the Corinteños and Chinandeganos—people of Corinto and Chinandega. Amy Bream and Marley Gevanthor’s triage skills kept the first day—always the hairiest—running smoothly and efficiently toward the primary care providers.

Meanwhile, HOPE volunteer Elise Chamberlain was leading a training day on pain management in one of the classrooms at the hospital. She and other volunteers covered four topics—Pain, Pain Management, Acupuncture, and Physical Therapy—to interested doctors and nurses from the Chinandega hospital.

The first two days of Continuing Promise’s presence in a country are also unique because we run a surgery screening clinic in addition to the primary care facilities. Here, volunteer general surgeon Bob Coleman saw as many patients as he could possibly see today (and will again tomorrow) to fill up his OR schedule for the next 9 days. He’s got several tough cases coming up for himself, including a woman with an incisional hernia that has been operated on four times, unsuccessfully.

“After the last time, the doctor looked at me and said, ‘I won’t touch it again,’” she told Dr. Coleman.

The injury is pretty large, and after his examination, Bob told her the risks of further operation, and the risks of leaving the injury as it is. He believes he’s found the reason why the previous surgeries failed, and that he has the equipment onboard to evade the same problem. She’s chosen to come onboard with us and go under Doctor Bob’s knife—we’ll see her in the hotel tomorrow.

Dr. Coleman was also asked for a special favor today, something somewhat unusual in Continuing Promise—the two-man general surgeon team showed him into the ICU where a young girl (she looks much older here than her 10 or 12 years) was in recovery after having had severe inflammation and infection in the abdominal area, tachycardia up to 120 beats a minute, and a very high fever. The surgeons had performed an appendectomy and opened several pockets of severe infection—now she is stable, but with a large surgery wound in her abdomen. They believed that she was on her way to recovery, but simply wanted his opinion on the case.

She was eating, talking, and fever was lower, which along with some other indications led Dr. Coleman to agree with their assessment. But the biggest thing was that when she saw our HOPE shirts, she sat up in bed and began excitedly pointing into her mouth—hardly the behavior of a fatally sick child. It turned out that she was just more excited to tell us about how she had come aboard the Comfort on its last visit, in ’07, for a cleft lip/palate surgery, which looked good enough now as to be almost undetectable. Abdominal wound, fever, whatever—this was important!

Thanks for reading-Jacob



PS—also, the US Surgeon General toured the Comfort and the worksites today. Nothing but kudos from him to the sailors, soldiers, and civilian volunteers that are keeping this mission afloat.

PPS—Happy Fourth of July!

Distinquished Guests Visit Volunteers

On Saturday (June 13), Colombian president Alvaro Uribe visited the Comfort.

Ambassadors from the United States and from Continuing Promise 2009 partner nations Canada, Chile and the Netherlands joined him for a tour of the Comfort's medical facilities. Along the way, President Uribe took time to stop and thank HOPE volunteers Tracy Kunkel, Tauna Ainslie and Kristen Wilson for their efforts to help his countrymen. He was visibly touched, when visiting patients in the post-op wards, by the good work they and all the Comfort's medical personnel are doing.


President Uribe is the latest in a long line of distinguished visitors to the Comfort that includes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Panamanian President Martin Torrijos, and Latin rock star Juanes. The Comfort's dedicated doctors, nurses, technicians, and support staff would do what they do regardless of whether they received recognition and praise, but these high-level visits underscore for all of us aboard that Continuing Promise 2009 is making a huge difference in the lives of people throughout the Americas, and that the Comfort--the big white ship visible from miles away--is a powerful symbol of American friendship.

-Daniel

Farewell to Panama

My two weeks with Project HOPE volunteers onboard the USNS Comfort is coming to a close. It’s been such a privilege to spend time with these inspiring professionals who leave behind their comfortable world for months at a time to offer health care and health education to those with so little. In such a short time, I’ve met new lifelong friends, reconnected with volunteers I have worked with in the past, experienced different cultures and learned a bit about life in the Navy. But most of all, I rekindled my spirit and enthusiasm for the work we do at Project HOPE. In a world where it sometimes seems like there is more wrong than right, our volunteers show everyday that a little care, a bit of compassion and an offer of HOPE goes a long way.

I would especially like to thank Paul Kline, a documentary photographer who accompanied me on this segment of Continuing Promise 2009. A true humanitarian with a sincere concern for others, especially children, Paul not only donated his time and amazing talent, he is donating to Project HOPE all the photos he took of our volunteers at work in Panama.

There are so many more stories to tell. Thankfully, Daniel Feith joined our group late last week, and he will be blogging about our volunteers as they continue their work. (I may sneak in a few more stories myself.) Former speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, Daniel is excited to be documenting the work of Project HOPE volunteers.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Melanie

Volunteers Continue Work in Antigua

Myriads of poor, medically underserved Antiguans crowded the two medical sites to receive basic care. HOPE’s volunteers, working at the Multicultural Center and St. John’s School improvised health centers continued delivering excellent medical care to a wide variety of patients. Simultaneously, our ship-based colleagues assisted as the first surgeries were done. Our education team moved ahead with their ambitious professional development program – now teaching Advanced Cardiac Life Support at St. John’s University

-By Dr. Ken Iserson, serving as Project HOPE's volunteer medical director in Antigua

Visiting a Clinic in Ghana

We woke up early to head to breakfast and a meeting in the mess hall. We were surprised to find a warm breakfast of made to order eggs, assorted local breads, coffee and of course the all important water. It was great way to begin the mission. After a meeting with our project coordinator we headed off to the Manhean Clinic in Tema. The drive to Tema was our first real look at Ghana since we had arrived so late the night before. What a beautiful country. It is truly a developing nation. The roads are good; there are homes and retail buildings being built (slowly) everywhere, women, men and children carry items for sale or from place to place balanced on their heads and music can be heard everywhere you go and there are goats on the side of the roads grazing on anything they can find. Women have brightly colored clothes made of wonderfully patterned cloth and a lot of them carry their babies swaddled close to their body in the cloth.

We arrived to the clinic in Tema, which is a much less developed city, and found one new brightly colored new yellow building on the grounds across from the clinic. The yellow building has no furniture in it but it will be the nurse educators’ classroom. Mercy, a nurse at Manhean, gave us a tour of the clinic. The grounds of the clinic smell a little like a sewer and there are goats roaming freely. It is a U-shaped concrete building without a/c and patients upon patients waiting in the heat to receive treatment. The treatment room is the size of a small office, the maternity ward is a room of 6 small beds with cots, and the scale used for weighing infants is rusted and much of the equipment is old and needs replacing. Because Ghana is a developing nation it still does not have the funds to provide some the basic medical supplies and medicines we have in the United States.

Mercy went on to show us the nutrition center which was a small wood building with two rooms. In one room sat a man grinding corn for corn meal that is combined with supplements. Every Thursday women arrive at the clinic where they are given two kilos of the corn meal to feed their children so they have a more nutritious diet. Mercy, told us they try to feed the children who come in because many times they suffer from malnutrition. While we were standing there a goat and chicken came by both feeding on stuff on the ground.

After our visit to the clinic we spent part of the afternoon trying to exchange money, visiting an internet café to get in touch with our families and then came home to a nice home cooked Ghanaian dinner. While we will be provided breakfast and dinner in the mess hall each day, for lunch we have a selection of Meals Ready to Eat or MREs. MREs are used by the military when out in the field. They are essentially a complete meal in a bag with tons of calories; I believe the bag said 1,200+ per meal. Everything is preserved in cartons in such a way that they don’t require refrigeration or heat but they do come with a just add water heater that is optional if you want a hot meal. Today, I opened up the chicken with salsa MRE. I only ate the Spanish rice and the crackers with jalapeno cheese spread. I needed someone to show me how to use the heater and I still almost burned myself. The whole package contained chicken in a cardboard carton, Spanish rice, M&M’s, a shortbread cookie, crackers, jalapeno cheese spread, drink mix to make your own mocha chino and iced tea. They’re quite an interesting product.

Tomorrow begin the lessons at Manhean taught by the nurse educators and also the midwifery classes on the USS Swift. I will be heading with the nurse midwives to the USS swift where the nurse midwives—Robin and Sue—will be teaching 34 students midwifery techniques.

--Marisol Euceda

Help support the Project HOPE mission in Africa.

Project HOPE Volunteers Arrive in Africa

After getting just about every vaccination known to man and some ugly khaki shorts to go with my Project HOPE t-shirts, I was finally packing so that I could be on my way to West Africa, specifically Ghana and Liberia, with Project HOPE. Project HOPE is a non-profit. More importantly they are a non-profit that focuses on sustainable advances in healthcare across the globe. They teach healthcare workers how to better care for their patients and train other health professionals so the cycle of learning and teaching continues long after Project HOPE has left the country. This is not the only thing Project HOPE does—Project HOPE has programs in 36 countries across the globe in women and children’s health, HIV/AIDS and TB, health systems and facilities, health professional education and humanitarian aid—but it is one of their main focuses and what the HOPE volunteers will be doing while in Africa.

Project HOPE volunteers and Project HOPE staff –myself included—were on our way to Africa to partner with the United States Department of Defense (DoD) for Operation Africa Partnership Station. This is not the first mission in which HOPE has partnered with the DoD. The first time was in January of 2005 when they asked Project HOPE to join them in a disaster relief mission to areas in Southeast Asia that were severely affected by the Tsunami. Asked to fill 200 positions HOPE reached out to the medical community and received over 4,000 volunteer applications. After the Tsunami Project HOPE again went on to help but this time stateside when Hurricane Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast. The Katrina and Rita missions were followed by another mission to Indonesia to continue caring for those still affected by the Tsunami. Most recently Project HOPE again joined the DoD for a 2007 summer mission to countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Now HOPE is at it again in West Africa.
With one suitcase and a cool back pack, that surprisingly held not only my laptop nicely but also a camcorder to record the work we will be doing, I was off to the airport for my 14 hour flight to Ghana. Traveling to Ghana required an almost seven hour flight to Germany and a two hour layover in the European country which almost took an unexpected turn when the volunteers and myself were asked if we would give up our seats for 600 Euros in cash because the flight to Nigeria/Ghana was over booked. After thinking about it for maybe 30 seconds –because that would have been a lot of money in U.S. dollars—we decided people needed us to be somewhere so we should continue our travels. Interestingly enough on our six hour flight from Germany to Lagos, Nigeria the flight attendants kept asking us if we wanted red or white wine or Bailey’s Irish Cream or cognac—don’t worry we all resisted the temptation. After an hour layover on the plane in Lagos we finally took off and landed Ghana an hour later where I and all the volunteers showed up exhausted but extremely excited.

After going through the immigration process rather quickly we proceeded to grab our luggage only to find out Sue—one of the nurse midwives—was missing one of her suitcases. She didn’t get very bothered because the suitcase that did arrive had her most important stuff in it, all of her education materials. When we actually exited the airport we were greeted by the heat and humidity of a country closer to the equator and what appeared to be hundreds of Ghanaians waiting and picking people up. We waited around too for our DoD counterparts to arrive. We than caravanned our way to what would be our home for the two weeks in Ghana. It was dark on our way so we could not get a glimpse at the country until the morning.

Our living space is barebones white and looks like a storage facility with one door leading to the men’s side and another to the women’s located across from what looks like an out of use hanger which is now our meeting place and mess hall. Inside the walls are white paneling and the floors look like they belong in a gymnasium but are not as bouncy. In the middle of the building there are two bathrooms divided by a simple curtain to separate the men from the women. Each bathroom has three stalls and three shower stalls and six sinks. Each room, because we have fewer women all the women got their own room while some of the men had to bunk up, has two sets of white metal bunk beds with blue bedding and eight lockers. These might sound like very basic rooms but we are all really impressed with the accommodations. The rooms are air-conditioned—a plus when you are trying to sleep in 90+ weather—and the showers have hot water and good water pressure.

With our accommodations settled we had a brief meeting went straight to the showers and bed. It seemed and still seems everyone is in high spirits and ready to work despite the weekend long travel.

--Marisol Euceda

Help support the Project HOPE mission in Africa.