Lines from the journal of missions volunteer Chuck Beech paint a vivid picture of his week with a medical outreach team in Honduras:
“The experience was at once heartwarming and heart breaking, the very definition of bittersweet. … Churches half-built for lack of funds but not half empty. … Humble people, both dignified and appreciative. … Kids who love to play and who recognize a grandparent when they see one despite the language barrier. … Doctors who for all their effort looked less like physicians and more like fathers at Christmas with a piece of candy or a trinket of some kind for every patient.”
Beech, along with 11 other volunteers, conducted medical clinics and one-day Bible clubs in January in rural areas around the southern city of Choluteca.
This effort was part of an ongoing partnership between Hunter Street Baptist Church, Hoover, and Iglesia Bautista Nazaret in Choluteca.
The medical team was led by Bill Bondurant, an emergency physician at Shelby Baptist Medical Center, and included four nurses, an EMT and another physician, Robert Snyder from Southcrest Baptist Church, Bessemer.
Five other volunteers from Southcrest and Westwood Baptist Church in Alabaster operated the clinic pharmacy, along with distributing tracts and New Testaments and led Bible clubs for children.
“The clinics saw nearly 2,000 patients in five days,” Snyder said. “Treatments included preventive health care with nutritional supplements and antibiotics, medicines for parasites, acute infections, eye care and even basic dental hygiene,” he noted.
Bible club workers relied on students from a local bilingual school to lead songs, make craft items and share Bible stories with more than 1,000 children during the course of the week.
Westwood member Harold Bush, who is also a Gideon, led an effort to provide area pastors with hundreds of Bibles to use in evangelism and discipleship ministries. Southcrest member Tommy Littleton also carried 12,000 gospel tracts to distribute at work sites and while the team traveled.
Reflecting on the project, Snyder recalls a particularly moving moment. “As we were finishing work one day I heard someone announce, ‘15 more minutes.’ I had seen hundreds of people that day and we were running out of medicine but there were still dozens more waiting in line.
“That’s when it struck me. We’ve been so blessed and their need is so great and time is running out. We only have 15 more minutes to share the love of Jesus and we must make them count.”
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