Hola! Me llamo es Katherine. I am a senior nursing student at Duke University and will be a part of the team who has taken on the pleasure of updating the blog with descriptions of our work and service in Honduras. During my first undergraduate experience, I pursued a degree in International Studies and did some international work for an environmental NGO in New Zealand. After that, I found myself in the back-country of Utah working with at-risk adolescents and adults in a wilderness therapy program. As an invested nursing student, I am really looking forward to merging my experiences in global health and therapeutic communication with the solid nursing foundation I have been given at Duke. My hope is that these things will help me overcome my language barrier, my Spanish skills are quite basic, and enable me to contribute to the patients we will work with in the clinic and the communities that we will visit. Please feel free to share this blog with all who are interested in tracking our experiences, as well as to leave comments, questions, and encouragement!
To catch you all up to speed: the past few months have been full of excitement and learning for our upcoming trip to Honduras and now we can say that the time is finally here! We are all packed (OK, I'll admit I am still getting a few things together) and are departing from North Carolina bright and early tomorrow morning.
We ended our didactic portion of this experience last weekend with discussing "all things clinic related". We had the pleasure of watching some of our more fluent speakers practice typical patient care scenarios in a team approach: one medical student, one nursing student, and one physical therapy student. With Rey acting as a variety of different Hondurans, it was both educational and hilarious! Some of the common issues that we will see were also revisited and that gave us an opportunity to delve back into discussing some of the ethical issues involved with short term medical outreach trips. As we have learned, we will collaborate as a team to provide care and education that will have a lasting effect vs. finding an immediate fix that will make us "feel good" without any real value for our patients. Our aim is to deliver the same patient-centered and holistic care that we strive to focus on in our respective practices at home.
On Saturday, we all gathered at the School of Nursing to pack the donated and collected supplies of the following varieties:
medicines, dental supplies, hygiene items, school supplies, and more. It was so amazing to see how much people were willing to contribute and we are all thrilled and thankful to see the bags stuffed to their gills! On behalf of the whole team, we would like to give a HUGE shout out and THANK YOU to Wesley Howard and his West Virginia University School of Dentistry Class of 2013, who collected money to provide us with 700 Oral B toothbrushes and 700 tubes of Crest toothpaste. These dental supplies will make a huge impact on the overall health of many Hondurans! Gracias! We also had many family members come to help us pack and count supplies and we could not have done the job so efficiently without them. Thank you all as well! I hope that everyone can take a few minutes to peruse through some of the pictures and videos of our packing day.
It is time to savor a few last minutes with my creature comforts, but I wish you all a great 2 weeks. A last side note for those going and our loved ones at home: I recently read in a magazine that on April 3rd and 4th the Earth will pass between the sun and Saturn, leaving us with a telescope-free view of the ringed planet. This only happens once every 3o years, so don't forget to check it out and think of your loved ones who are in Honduras looking at that same bright sky!