Health Care for 10,000 Nicaraguan Campesinos

Our doctor is a knowledgeable and experienced general practitioner, perfect for our mobile clinic. She sees adults and children during mobile clinic visits to the villages, and in our consultation rooms in Ocotal. She also teaches our staff, brigadistas and patients about various health issues.

One of our doctor’s important tasks is to recognize when a patient is seriously ill and needs to be transferred to the hospital or needs to see a specialist. This is when it starts to get complicated, because many specialists are in Managua, never near the villages, and only rarely in Ocotal. And a patient must often wait weeks or months before they can see a specialist. 

Recently, we have found a German dermatologist who has been been helping us with the diagnosis and treatment of skin diseases free of charge. We frequently see patients with skin diseases, which are sometimes difficult to diagnose. During a mobile clinic visit, our Nicaraguan doctor takes good quality photos of the patient’s affected area. When the doctor returns to Ocotal, she sends the photos and the patient’s history to the German specialist. Within hours, the German dermatologist responds with advice and recommendations for therapy. 

This new innovation, using today’s technology, enables us to treat our patients more effectively. We are very grateful to our German dermatologist for this much needed support and assistance. 

We work in 11 different communities in the north of Nicaragua. All of them are like a center and people from other villages walk - often for hours- to attend our clinic. This way we are able to cover a big area of Nueva Segovia and Madriz and make our free medical service available for a big number of people. All this villages are more than one hour drive away from Ocotal , some of them more than 2 hours.
We offer this service now for 17 years, all year round, for some years every weekday, currently every other week.. All this driving on extremely bad roads - well road is not really the correct wording, it's more paths, sometimes extremely steep, with extrem potholes, rocks, mudd and loose sand- put a lot of stress on crew, especially the driver and even more on our car.
Last moth we had a severe accident. Returning from the clinic the steering broke, the experienced driver lost control over the vehicle and the car came of the road. Luckily there was no deep valley but it was a shock for all our stuff. Only minor injuries, but a severely damaged car.
It was complicated to rescue the car, and it took several days in the workshop before it was repaired.
Meaning no outpatient clinic for some days. And major expenses.
We always make sure that the car gets frequent overhauls to work reliable and safe but after all this years working on extremely bad roads it gets old and we have to think about replacing it. Which will be a major expense. For the moment we continue with our "beloved" Toyota Hilux...