St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church © All rights reserved.

Mission: Honduras (MH) is an evangelical medical mission to Southeastern Honduras.  St. Christopher’s is the host church for this mission and Fr. Paul is the spiritual director.  The mission is once a year, each summer.  Over the past ten years, the M-H team has seen just over 24,000 patients and distributed about $2,000,000 of free meds and supplies.  Our efforts are co-coordinated with the Honduran Episcopal Church; especially with Padre Dagoberto Chacon, Dean of the Episcopal Deanery of Yuscaran, the area we work in.  We co-ordinate very carefully with him in all our planning.  In each village, local church volunteers work with our team, side by side.  It is a very good collaboration.

 

In addition to the annual medical mission, Mission: Honduras has committed to helping three rural aldeas, or village areas: Agua Viva, Tenidero, and Ocotal.  We provide scholarships, pay a pastoral salary, and support church construction efforts in the area.  This area is very rural with no industry, very poor quality land, and the people can just barely eke out a living.  Heriberto Herrera is the lay pastor in Aqua Viva, Oropoli, and El Pericon.  Our team supports him financially while he serves these very poor villages.

 

Another of the MH on-going projects is the purchase of Books of Common Prayer in Spanish for local churches.  It is difficult to purchase them in Honduras and they are very expensive--about $34, which is about two weeks pay for this area  We can purchase them here for $20 each and would like to be able to take at least 40 down for the churches of La Santisima Trinidad and Ascencion.  Spanish Bibles are also needed.  In the past, the team purchased paperback songbooks for every congregation in the deanery.

 

Each year the mission carries down at least 2000 “family packs” to give to each family at the clinics we hold.  Many at St. Chris’, especially the youth, have helped pack them for years in the past.  These family packs include toothbrushes, soap (many mothers wash their children with sand, yes sand), shampoo, Tylenol, vitamins, and any other hygiene supplies we receive.  Over the next year, we need donations of these supplies.

 

Each year MH purchases $7,500 in medication that we cannot obtain as donations.  About $4,000 of that we buy in Honduras since it is cheaper for certain medicines.  You can help us by participating in the fund raising drives we will have to help raise this money; selling calendars, tee shirts, and coffee cups are just some of the ways we will be raising funds.

 

One of the leading causes of death (30%) in Honduras is diarrhea (usually infection caused by poor water with germs and parasites).  The second leading cause of death (24%) is respiratory problems; asthma is rampant.  Sanitation is a problem for one-half of the Hondurans and one-fourth of them have NO access to water.  Sadly, of those with access to water, one-third of the water is not safe to drink.  In the July 2008 mission, we gave away 40,000 anti-parasite tablets and 55 gallons of cough syrup, along with the antibiotics and other meds.  We continue to try to make a difference in parasitic infestations.  We use World Health Organization guidelines for treating and treat everyone living in the same house with someone diagnosed as having parasites.  So far, the MH record is 26 infected people living in one house.

 

Many at St. Christopher’s have participated in the El Paraiso Scholarship Fund.  Thank you!  Education is one means of helping Honduras children achieve a better life.  It really does make a difference in their lives.  Of the 5 million Hondurans, 42% are children and for many their future is an earning capacity of a dollar or two a day harvesting coffee (approximately 24% population lives on less than $1/day).  School is free for the first six years, but costs after that.  Most boys quit school to work in the fields at that point.  Many of the girls cannot go on due the costs of tuition and supplies for Colegio or high school.  Currently, the scholarship fund is providing $160 a year for students, this covers most of the costs of going to school, but the family must contribute something, too.  In addition, the “Beccas” (the scholarship students) must work in community projects and make good grades.

 

Each year we collect school supplies to carry to the primary students in El Paraiso.  Another project for 2009 is to collect Spanish-English dictionaries to carry to the “Beccas”.

 

This mission exists only because of the support provided by this church!