Sponsor Valle Arriba-Medicine & Clean Water

We are going back to Honduras in May! At least, that’s the plan. The emergence of the Omicron variant has introduced some uncertainty into international travel by university groups. Yet, because we have so much to prepare for, we are operating under the assumption that we will be in Honduras in just over five months.

What does it take to prepare for a 10-day public health immersion? I’m so glad you asked! We just assembled our team of students, faculty, doctors, nurses, and interpreters. Because we are a university group, we have to do things in stages as the semester calendar allows. Since this is finals week and students will be home until mid-January, we can’t do any training. In the meantime, students will be fundraising for their trip as well as for medications. The faculty will start looking for good deals on medications from charitable organizations like KingsWay and AmeriShares.

Once everyone is back on campus for the winter/spring semester, training and fundraising will ramp up a few notches. Students will be reviewing how to code data, take blood pressures, measure blood glucose levels, and more. It all culminates in a hectic post-finals week where we sort and bag medications and finalize any last-minute training.

Our goal is to raise about $10,000 for medications and another $5,000 for water filters/buckets. We’d like to thank you for your continued support in our endeavors, and happy holidays to all!

I bring you an important update! The last time I wrote to you, Covid-19 was still ravaging our communities here in the United States, although vaccinations were on the rise. The intervening months have provided both clarity (all Americans over 12 have access to a vaccine) and ambiguities (how bad will the Delta variant be?), but we now have enough information to key you in on what’s going on with our trip to Honduras.

First, JCU will be going to Honduras in May 2022! This means we can start planning, fundraising, and purchasing supplies for the trip. That said, no plan is 100 percent locked in at this point: Covid is still present and doing damage.

Second, we have some friends from SUNY Fredonia and Tacoma, Washington going down to Honduras at the end of this week. They will be visiting Valle Arriba and some other nearby villages that have been provided water filters. We pray for their safety and eagerly await their update on the filters and general health of the people in these communities.

Finally, and most importantly, the vaccine is becoming more prevalent in Honduras. Cato, one of our contacts down there, reported that over 1.5 million vaccines recently arrived in the country and that 1.5 million more were expected shortly. He also stated that the staff at Nuevo Paraiso had been vaccinated and that many people in the rural areas in which we serve have received the shot(s). This is good news, indeed!

As I conclude this report, I want to lay out a little bit of a timeline related to our work in Honduras over the next few months:

• July-August 2021: A small group of people will travel to Honduras and check in on Valle Arriba
• September 2021: JCU will start recruiting student participants for the May 2022 trip
• November 2021: The JCU team will be finalized and begin prep work for May
• February 2022: Our friends at Bethlehem Lutheran Church are tentatively planning to travel to Honduras
• May 2022: Our first trip to Honduras since 2019!

Thank you for your continued generosity and support of our project to provide clean water and improved health care to people in and around Valle Arriba. Our next report will consist of the update we receive from our friends’ July-August trip.