BY SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Dr. Jeffery Heck
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They started by sleeping on the floor of the town hall and working out of local schools. But over the course of 18 months and three trips back to Honduras, Dr. Jeffery Heck and a handful of colleagues built a clinic that would soon buzz with 30 patients a day.
It's called Barrio de Cincinnati by villagers in Santa Lucia, a town in the southwest corner of this Central American country. And now eight years after that first trip, Dr. Heck plans to use it as a base to launch a major humanitarian effort for a nation the size of Tennessee blown apart by Hurricane Mitch.
He won't be alone. The entire Cincinnati area will be enlisted to help.
Every other week for the next year, a church or school district in the region will be targeted. They'll be asked to fill a container as big as a semi-trailer with food, clothing or medicine.
People need to keep helping, long after Central America disappears from the headlines, he said.
"My real worry is that the first bomb dropped on Iraq will be the first bomb dropped on the relief effort," Dr. Heck said.
Instead, it will take years to rebuild after the fierce storm left more than 6,000 people dead and a million homeless in Honduras, which took the brunt of the storm. It left another 4,000 dead in neighboring Nicaragua.
Dr. Heck, director of the University of Cincinnati-Franciscan Hospital Family Medicine & International Health Programs, encourages Cincinnati to adopt three areas of Honduras where the collected goods can be sent:
- The Yoro district, north of the capital Tegucigalpa. The district had its three main roads washed out and can only receive food and medicine by helicopter.
- La Lima, in the northwest corner of the country, was covered in water from surrounding rivers.
- Santa Lucia, where the clinic exists. Right now workers there are trying to educate villagers to the south about how to stop an outbreak of cholera in El Salvador from spreading into Honduras.
The goods collected in Cincinnati will be shipped through Chiquita Brands International, said Dr. Heck, also a professor in the UC Department of Family Medicine.
Since the clinic opened in 1993, Dr. Heck or a team of doctors, students and nurses have traveled to Honduras every six months to work in the clinic or set up makeshift clinics in remote areas. The operation is run by the nonprofit Shoulder to Shoulder Inc., based in Cincinnati.
"The hardest thing is going to be for people to stay in the relief effort," he said. "(The problem) is not going to go away in a month or two months."
A recent tour through Honduras to assess the dire medical needs prompted his plan. It was a few weeks ago he left a green, lush country filled with swaying banana fields and ripening corn.
On Monday, he returned to brown-covered misery. Once bustling cities are reduced to rubble.
Beds hung from trees, upside-down cars lay filled with mud, and debris dangled from the top of telephone wires.
"Even the middle class and the wealthy were reduced to poverty," Dr. Heck said.
In the coming weeks, malaria, cholera, malnutrition and other diseases could set in if the people don't get medical supplies in time, he said.
Aside from humanitarian concerns, Cincinnati has other ties to the region.
There are more than 1,000 companies in the Greater Cincinnati area that do business with Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, according to Rene Thomas, international marketing director for the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce.
"It's across the board," Ms. Thomas said. "It's everything from consumer goods to equipment."
About $130 million worth of exports were shipped from here to Central America and the Caribbean in 1996, the latest available numbers from the U.S. Commerce Department.
Chiquita Brands International laid off its more than 7,000 workers in Honduras on reduced pay after the hurricane destroyed banana crops. The Cincinnati-based company reportedly lost $100 million in the disaster.
Procter & Gamble Co. officials say they do not yet know what kind of damage, if any, they suffered from the storm. Procter & Gamble has offices in Guatemala City and San Salvador, El Salvador, as well as two plants in Guatemala.
"It's very juvenile to think it's not a global economy," Ms. Thomas said. "The companies trading in the Caribbean and Central America will be affected at some level. Whether it's enough to be visible to the lay person is another question."
![[heck map]](/editions/1998/11/14/heckmap_180x142.gif)