- - -  Helping Honduras Kids invites you to learn more about the work of Dr. Donna Caplan.  While this is not an HHK project, we applaud Dr. Caplan and her work in the Cuenca.
   

HEALTHCARE TO HONDURAS
Dr. Caplan Brings Health Care and Education to Remote, Under-Served Areas of Honduras

The Situation
The Cuenca of the Rio Cangrejal is a river gorge in Honduras near the city of La Cieba. It is mountainous, rugged, and gifted with a beauty as grand as the California Sierras. It is blighted by poverty. Health care is scarce, and the women and children suffer the most. Women face large cultural and gender barriers to their acquiring timely, quality health care.

Dr. Caplan treats long-suffering patient in Clinic 

A Little Serving of Help
Over the last 18 months Dr. Donna Caplan has traveled to Honduras six times to assess the health care situation in several rural areas and to seek out the appropriate place to offer her services to help reduce the women’s and children’s health crisis in that country. She traveled to Honduras in February and March, 2008 on the first of many trips to expand the services of the already established clinic of Dr. David Black, an M.D. who has been serving the medical needs of very poor on the North Honduran coast since 2001. Dr. Caplan will be spending 8 months per year in Honduras pursuing this work.  It is Dr. Caplan’s and Dr. Black’s wish to deliver better and more widespread healthcare to the women and children of La Cuenca. Donna has been involved in outreach and care to families. She will continue to offer her services for general health needs and screening, pre and post-natal care, pap smears, family planning and birth control education, and STD education and treatment to the women.

Women  wait at the Clinic to see Dr. Donna

What is Needed
Dr. Caplan is working in Honduras on a volunteer basis and is asking your help to finance this project. Your donation will provide free medical care, lab work, medicines, nutritional supplements, in-country transportation, facilities, and materials and supplies such as pap smear kits, birth kits, and condoms. Pre-natal vitamins are particularly important in La Cuenca where it is a challenge to obtain good nutrition. The La Cuenca women cannot afford these supplements. Many families are not able to buy beans much less a meat or dairy protein source.

In Latin American cultures, poverty, lack of education and male dominance are all factors that greatly increase the health risks to women. As a result, cervical cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for women in Honduras. According to the WHO in 2000, the incidence of cervical cancer among women in Honduras is at least 4 times that of the U.S., and death from cervical cancer is 6 times greater in Honduras than in the U.S.  Cervical cancer is a very slow growing cancer and is completely detectable by regular pap smear screening. If cervical cell changes, dysplasia, are detected, cervical cancer is treatable. It is unnecessary for any woman to die of this disease like the La Cuenca woman shown in the photo below. Because Honduras does not have an organized screening program such as pap smears, too  many women die. In well organized screening programs such as those in many developed countries, the incidence of mortality due to cervical cancer is reduced by up to 90%.

Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, is one of the hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. 1.5% of the adult population is infected, and, of course, the incidence of HIV is underreported. Among women of child bearing age, AIDS is the biggest killer in Honduras. Lack of services, the distance to the few existing medical facilities, the expense, and the lack of education about STDs, cervical cancer/pap smears, and health care in general greatly increases the risk for the women of La Cuenca. “Old wives tales” about health are rampant. For example, many women think that getting married will protect them from HIV infection.  However, in this culture the prevalence of male extramarital activity commonly brings STD’s into the home.

  Dr. Caplan visits woman with already advanced cervical cancer at her remote home.

For her, prevention is too late. She is a lovely human being living most of the day by herself in pain, in a house one hour up a steep mountain path. Her husband works during the day; her grandson is at school, and she is at home dying of cervical cancer.

Dr. Caplan’s Plan
Dr. Caplan has begun to focus on the neglected families of La Cuenca with a program of women’s health care that includes family education on STDs, pap smears, birth control,  hygiene, etc., as well as a condom distribution program. She encourages women to come for pap smear screening on a regular basis. The response to the offer of pap smears has been good. She also offers pre-natal and post-natal. As a holistic family practitioner, she screens for and treats a wide range of health problems, especially caring for the pediatric population.   Your financial assistance will allow Dr. Caplan to pay for the equipment, lab work, supplements, medicines, condoms, etc.  that are so badly needed. The women can’t pay. That cost is just too big a hurdle since they can barely afford food. Dr. Caplan treats patients in a clinic housed in the home of Peter Johnson, a compassionate, retired dairy farmer from New Hampshire who has dedicated his life to the improvement in the quality of life of the very poor in the La Cuenca area. Peter continues to distribute medicines and supplements to Dr. Caplan’s patients in between her trips to Honduras. In March, Juan, a community health outreach person, funded by a church organization, joined the clinic. He is renting a room in the complex where the clinic is housed and works closely with the clinic. He walks the country-side visiting people in their homes for follow up to clinic visits,  educates those he calls on, and   collaborates with Dr. Caplan on specific patient needs. He made one of the trips up the mountain to meet the woman with cervical cancer who is pictured above. He continues to visit her, as she is lonely and frightened, as well as other women and families in remote areas. Dr. Donna spends whatever time the patient’s condition requires to diagnose and treat each patient including the use of Chinese medicine and acupuncture. In her work in Honduras, she has found a new freedom to focus on the patient and to spend the time needed to facilitate healing. The results are very apparent in the high percentage of success with her patients there.                                   

 A young man with eye problems receives acupuncture treatment

How You Can Help/Make a Donation
All donations are tax deductible.  Please make your contributions to Helping Honduras Kids, and send them to Dr. Donna Caplan, Vermont Integrative Medicine, 172 Berlin St.,  Montpelier VT 05602.  In the “Memo” of the check, write, “Dr. Donna Caplan Project”. Your donation is tax deductible since HHK is a 501 C3 and even the smallest amount will go a long way in La Cuenca.

If you wish to contribute online you can use Donation-Net.  Click on the upper right hand corner of the page where it says, “Donation-Net; Click here to make a donation to Helping Honduras Kids.” This takes you to a page where you can designate the size and type of your gift. There is a pull down box on this page entitled, “I wish my funds to be applied to:”. If you click on the pull down box, you will see one of the options is “Dr. Donna Caplan Project.” 

We hope you are able to assist Dr. Caplan in her effort to bring basic healthcare to the people of La Cuenca.  These families face challenges we, as "first worlders", find difficult to imagine. For many there is little chance of moving beyond the subsistence farming and hand to mouth existence that leaves them hungry and vulnerable when meager crops fail or a parent or provider isn’t there any more. We want to help. We hope you will help us to help them.