Final Report From June’s HOMBRE Trip

As a brief final report from June’s trip, I’m excerpting from the report we submitted to HOMBRE’s leadership:

“Our project was limited somewhat by the fact that I was unable to secure any U.S. providers other than myself to participate on this trip.  We had budgeted medications and supplies for 3 physicians working for 8 days.  As it turned out, we worked with a Dominican physician on June 4, 5, 6, 10 and 12; and a second Dominican physician on June 7.  This limited our total # of patients seen, as we had to spend some time on June 4 and June 7 orienting the Dominican doctors to our system.  Also, on June 8 we did not have a Dominican physician and so could see fewer patients that planned.
Overall, our estimate is that we saw approximately 425 patients from June 4-8 and another 100 patients June 10-12 for a total of around 525 patients during the project.  I think that, had we been able to secure 1 or 2 more physicians (as I had hoped) we could have easily increased this number to 800 or 900 patients.”

Personally, I am tremendously proud of the HOMBRE students I worked with and am thankful to them for their hard work, their perseverance and resiliance, and impressed by their determination during this project.  Kate Zedler, Mai Grant, Zeenia Gilani, Mona Singh, Trevàn Rankin, David Hsu, Max Sirkin, Nhi Nguyen and Katie Sprinkel: all did an amazing job, and I am glad that I was able to work with such an outstanding team.  Mohammad Torabinejad (one of the SOMOS students) was invaluable, and many of the community’s residents worked very hard to make this trip a success.

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Next Trip

I realize that this is very early, but we are really trying to get the word out as early as possible once we have an upcoming medical trip in the works.

As of now, we are planning on traveling back to the Dominican Republic for the week of January 4-8, 2010.  We’ll be using the weekends on each side of that week for travel.

The details are largely still to be determined, but check back periodically as we will update as things develop.  Also, we will provide more information about safety, etc. in light of the events in June.

Thanks

I would like to make a brief note to thank the congregation of Christ Ascension Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia. The church’s members have been working to help us with our next service trip to the Dominican Republic, and I received word today that they have collected a large number of adult multivitamins and will help purchase childrens’ multivitamins for the next trip.

This is a major help: we try very hard to provide vitamins for all of the patients we see in the DR, as we think that many people lack adequate nutrition. However, vitamins are very expensive and often make up a large proportion of our costs.

So–thank you very much to all the members and the leadership of Christ Ascension. We appreciate your help, and your trust in supporting our work.