Making a Lasting Impact in Nicaragua

​By CASEY GRAVES​, MD​The Northeast Presbyterian Church (NEPC) has been organizing mission trips to Nicaragua for many years. These trips generally comprise operating roving clinics and performing ministry work in different parts of the country each year. Recently, they added a new option: The church began sending volunteers to a newly established clinic in an extremely poor community to provide affordable care, and I was one of them.   Cristo Rey was a community formed from the good intentions of the Spanish government, which carries out a significant amount of humanitarian work in Nicaragua. Many people previously lived in the city dump of Managua (Nicaragua's capital city), where they subsisted off other people's garbage and from selling anything salvageable. The dump was closed, and people living there were moved to an area on the outskirts of the city and given materials to build small structures in which to live. These people have remained impoverished, however, and subsequently, many went back to their old way of life when a new trash dump was established adjacent to Cristo Rey. It is here that the new clinic, Clinica Betesda, was established to help people most in need but lack access to health care. The clinic is open daily, but there is only one doctor who attends regularly. They are severely limited in what medications and services they can provide. The goal of the NEPC mission trip is to meet some of these needs and draw the community into...
Source: Going Global - Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs