By: Linda Diep

Meet the Velasquez-Medina family: Gregorio Velasquez and Anastasia Medina live in a small two-room home with their two adult children, Carla and Oscar, and their two small grandchildren, Hector and Catherin, in rural Joyas del Carballo, Honduras.

The Velasquez-Medinas is one of the poorest families in their small community, living on $5 a day, lacking basic necessities such as clean water, and going without food on most days. There are many families living in these impoverished conditions throughout Honduras and the world; fortunately, there are organizations such as Global Brigades who work in developing countries and serve families just like the Velasquez-Medina family. Global Brigades is a 501c3 nonprofit organization working to mobilize student volunteers to help provide individuals in Honduras and Panama with a better quality of life through economic, public health, medical, and infrastructure assistance. This summer, I and Campus Challenge winner Manuel Claros, were fortunate enough to participate in a Public Health Brigade – a week-long trip where student volunteers work to improve living conditions for an assigned family – to Joyas del Carballo, Honduras. We worked on four construction projects in efforts to help provide the Velasquez-Medina family with a better quality of life.

Meeting the family for the first time

We landed in the city of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, on August 7, 2010. We then took a two hour drive to the traditional hacienda-style compound where we would reside for the next week. In the coming days, we met the Velasquez-Medina family and began work straight-away on four construction projects: 1.) building a latrine, 2.) cementing dirt floors, 3.) constructing a pila or basin for water storage, and 4.) deconstructing the current stove so smoke would funnel out of the house safely. The purpose of these projects was to provide sustainable solutions to health problems experienced by the family – such as asthma from inhaling smoke from cooking and diarrhea from contaminated drinking water – and also to prevent the spread of disease.

One of the greatest lessons that I took away from my time with the Velaquez-Medina family was that you don’t need much in life to be happy. As we were sitting on buckets in the family’s small haphazard kitchen with no electricity and floors made of dirt, Anastasia and Carla were cracking jokes, and Gregorio was talking about how privileged he felt to be provided with some of life’s basic necessities. The contentment with what very little they had was humbling, leading us all to evaluate our own lives and priorities.

Working on the pila

On our itinerary, we were scheduled to work on our projects for the Velasquez-Medina family Monday-Wednesday. Each morning, we woke up at 6:00am and made the two hour drive on unpaved, bumpy roads to our work site, the family’s home. For three days, we built the latrine, cemented the dirt floors, constructed the pila, and re-built the stove all by hand. The work was labor-intensive and physically draining, however, knowing that these projects would serve as sustainable solutions to many of the health issues that this and other families in the community are faced with on a daily basis was our motivation. All of us were also inspired by the drive and hard work that the head of the household Gregorio Velasquez was putting into each project. He had a hand in every single aspect of construction, and never stopped to take a break. And even though he was 66 years old, which is the average retirement age for many Americans, he was still able to carry an 80 pound bag of dry cement down a steep hill, all in efforts to provide a better life for his family.

Although members of the family have not been diagnosed with parasites, many children within the community suffer from NTDs. Another student group from London who was on a Medical Brigade observed that a large portion of the community were infected with intestinal worms(which was evident by swollen bellies), and witnessed community drug distributors distributing albendozole – a drug used to treat roundworm, whipworm, and tapeworm – at a local community center. The medical students mentioned that this type of drug distribution usually occurs via the aid of a Global Brigade group.

This was confirmed when our group visited a nearby school. Manuel asked one of the teachers about school-wide deworming initiatives. The teacher informed us that deworming in that particular school occurs every six months, and drugs are given by Global Brigade groups. This deworming is not mandated by the school system; rather the faculty took it upon themselves to actively get their students dewormed on a regular basis. Documentation of deworming is then reported to the local health department.

There are many communities such as Joyas del Carballo that rely on the services and advocacy provided by organizations such as Global Brigades. Please visit the Global Brigades website to join a brigade, and also stop by the Global Network website to join the fight against NTDs.

To view all my photos from the Brigade, including before and after pictures of the home, please visit our Flickr page.

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