Life in the Most Violent Place on Earth

How to summarize the last 72 hours or so?  The dozen or so clinics, hospitals, rural pharmacies, and even military bases I’ve had the privilege to visit and interview? The 19 pages of notes scrawled into my notebook? The 22 videos I took of doctors, nurses, and patients sharing their stories? The countless more children, mothers, and families saved by access to critical medicines? I guess all of that will somehow come together soon into one report... 

I’ve been in Honduras, Central America....

...to have a look, along with a donor of medicines and medical supplies, at how these donated medicines have been are reaching those who really need them. HOPE raises funds to send these critically-needed medicines to our partners and support their work in using these medicines to improve community healthcare.
 

I touched down in Honduras on Tuesday morning with a much different take on what I was about to walk into, than I usually do when I travel. I’d just been to a talk by the Attorney General of Guatemala last week about violent crime in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador – the astronomical homicide rates. With both historical (Spanish conquest, fruit companies, political unrest, civil war, coup d’etat a few years back here in Honduras, actually, when I was in Guatemala) and regional (drug trade route) reasons, little did I know til recently that these three countries are among the most violent places on earth. Without getting into more gruesome details that can cause more fear than care to those that don’t hold Central America so dear to heart, Honduras’ homicide rate, the highest in the world, is 91 deaths per 100,000 people - over 7,000 murders last year. 7,000 lives ended - people, like you and I, no longer here. And, though improving by celebration-worthy leaps and bounds (would love to tell you more if you’re interested) -- most of these crimes still go unprosecuted, with no consequences. 

The Most Violent Place On Earth - Trailer from stephen herman on Vimeo.

I can’t imagine. It made me cautiously curious in a concerned way to see how our work played out on the ground here. 

Do you know this neighbourhood very well? Is it safe if I wanted to go running here in the morning?

Here? NOOO! It’s very dangerous here!

Do you feel safe here when you go out?

No. Life here is like a threat.

Do you feel scared on a daily basis here?

Well yes. Life isn’t worth anything here. There is no value in life. 

It’s not quite so dangerous in the rural areas, where we primarily work, away from the capital city...  but even there – where single mothers dig limestone out of the mountainside for a living to feed her children and the orphans she has taken in, where 11 year olds are forced by poverty to prostitute themselves to truckers along the highway that weaves through the poorest villages, where HIV/AIDS spreads along these trucker routes, where we meet mere children in the hospital coddling their newborn babies.... – where is the value of life?

In little glimpses, I get to see, it is here. It is yet incomplete, but it is here.

Here, in a doctor of an HIV/AIDS center that walks the line between life and death on a daily basis -- that, with encouraging smiles, fights for life with her 96 patients (youngest of which is only 13). And as she cares for her patients, fights with them, she tells us, I transmit hope. Everything else is in God’s hands.

Here, in our lovely staff Magda, that coordinates all our (amazing and extensive) community health programs while lovingly raising three young children, committed to them, and committed to helping them grow into their own compassion and humility that she lives out each day - a true Super Mom.

Here, in a dedicated woman, without formal education, but trained in community health, who faithfully serves as a volunteer community health monitor, diagnosing common illnesses, running a small pharmacy out of her home, and sharing, in her words, the “gift” of medicines with the families around her. There are 107 others like her, together reaching some 300 little villages throughout the area. The Ministry of Public Health wonders why there are no cases of pneumonia being reported in these areas where we work, and, investigating, finds that it is because there aren’t any – the volunteer community health monitors have effectively eliminated this in helping mothers keep their children healthy and providing immediate care when they fall sick, even voluntarily rushing to homes at 4 o’clock in the morning with a nebulizer when children fall ill to respiratory infection.

Here, in crowded public hospital filled with compassionate doctors and shelves stock full of donated medicines and equipment; in moms soothing the cries of their sick children, as they receive care, treatment, and medicines that would otherwise be inaccessible to the poor because of their prohibitive costs.  

And, in little boy with hot cheeks and sniffles, clutching a bottle of donated grape-flavoured kid’s Tylenol that arrived to the clinic last year.

And in a maternity ward -- here we all are dressed in hospital garb as we step inside -- where we hear that before, at least four women died each year in childbirth in that particular municipality. Now, with proper facilities, doctors, and medicines, there are no more deaths of mothers or children.

And, perhaps most profoundly of all, in an AIDS patient, more frail than anyone I’ve ever seen with my own eyes -- mere skin draped over bones; sunken eyes lifelessly gazing past the circular frame of the bony cavity that holds them. My colleague describes, like someone from a Nazi concentration camp.

But we witness life here. Here, in this man hooked up to an IV with antibiotics... one of many bags of IV antibiotics that arrived from a HOPE shipment just two months ago. The doctor tells us this man's story story - one week from death when he walked into the clinic... and affirms with a hushed but joyful whisper that he is not going to die.

And we realize, in this moment, there is life. This is not a patient dying of AIDS. This is a man living... living with AIDS. 

The donor of these antibiotics is with me, and he takes in the life that is being given, as those medicines found their way just two months ago from Kansas, to our Hondurian partners, to this clinic, and into the arm and blood of this very man who will recover and live.

And we stand together, along with this man, with the doctor, and with our local staff...  not only with conviction, but also with commitment...  that each life is of value.

Even in the most violent place on earth.


A few months ago, the pastor at my church gave us this benediction. I hope it is as freeing and life-giving for you as it is for me.. and, in turn, for many more. :)

If living well is to love,
Go and live.