LatinaLista — The ongoing sniping back and forth over the Affordable Care Act is trivial and senseless when viewed from the perspective of villagers of Santa Ana, Intibuca, Honduras.
Since 2004, the 700 villagers of this remote mountain town have been praying that each year will be the time when the area’s only medical clinic will be finished and fully operational so that the sick of the village don’t have to travel over five hours to get to the nearest hospital in Honduras or cross the border one-and-a-half hours away into El Salvador and try to access that country’s hospital system.
It was in 2004 that the Baylor College of Medicine’s Houston Shoulder to Shoulder Foundation pledged to raise money to help build a medical clinic in Santa Ana if the local people could raise money to buy the land. The locals completed their part of the bargain and construction was begun.
The unfinished clinic has been used by a local doctor to provide basic services. She’s joined twice a year with a brigade from Baylor College of Medicine, made up of medical faculty, medical students, optometrists, public health students, and a dentist who travel to Santa Ana to conduct large clinics.
However, now the Foundation finds itself $50,000 short of completing the clinic in time before the rainy season hits, a time that makes travel into the village nearly impossible and dangerous, as well as, for the villagers trying to leave the area for greater medical care than what their current clinic can provide.
From women’s wellness checkups and examinations to eye exams, dental care, outpatient surgery and an onsite pharmacy, the clinic will be the central medical facility for the region.
The Baylor doctors started a crowd-funding campaign to help finish construction which must be done within the next month. With only 24 days left in the campaign, as of this writing, the people of Santa Ana are praying that their wish for healthcare becomes a reality.
Any monies collected by the deadline of the campaign will be used towards finishing the clinic even if the goal isn’t met.
