A Thousand Hours and a Day
Most of our supplies are shipped from Virginia on a 40-foot container, arriving at our warehouse in Honduras.
Early on the morning of November 4, our surgery team will begin its first operation. The patient may likely be a man with benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) who’s been relying on a catheter for the ability to urinate for perhaps as long as two or three years. Among the poorest of the poor in Honduras, this patient will probably tell our surgical team, as others like him have told our teams in past years, “I have been praying for you every day - for years.”
His procedure will probably take about an hour, will go smoothly, and will change his life profoundly.
But what this patient might not know about what just happened for him - indeed, what many people might not even think about - is that just this one patient’s hour on the operating table probably required upwards of a thousand hours of work over the past year by the Virginia Hospital Center Medical Brigade.
To begin with, if the Brigade doesn’t bring every medical supply item required for its work, nothing can happen. Coordinating the gathering of medical supplies - organizing, counting, sorting, record keeping, packing, warehousing, shipping, unpacking, distributing - requires a year of volunteer efforts.
Besides this, the lodging and feeding of 80+ medical personnel for a week in Honduras requires untold hours of menu planning, food shopping, and preparations. Some of the most demanding work of the Brigade falls upon our kitchen staff who begin each day at 4:30 a.m. and whose labors don’t end until 9 at night. Without their work, the Brigade couldn’t happen.
Additionally, the building of trust and working relationships with hospitals, rehabilitation centers, schools, and government officials in Honduras opens the way for our work to proceed; without it, our mission couldn’t happen.
Supplies are then sorted and organized by volunteers at the hospitals where we work.
Perhaps at this point, we might ask: is each thousand hours of preparation worth one patient’s day in the hospital? Maybe we could ask the question another way: after each patient’s day in the hospital, how many hundreds of thousands of hours of a better life have we opened up for them? As Shakespeare’s King Lear cried out, “Oh, reason not the need.”
Our OR team prepares for a week of surgeries!