BY SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
SANTA LUCIA, Honduras - The first time Miguel Coello delivered a baby, he did it with the aid of a flashlight. The Honduran doctor, an employee of the Cincinnati-based nonprofit Shoulder to Shoulder Inc., worked for three years without electricity.
He never expected to be in Santa Lucia that long. But six years after he arrived, Dr. Coello is still rising with the roosters to wait on the first of about 30 patients each day.
He's one of two doctors working in the clinic in this remote city that's one of the poorest in Honduras.
What made him stay was the need and dedication of the people who built the foundation of the clinic, which was constructed by members of Shoulder to Shoulder.
"It made me feel I was really needed in this town," Dr. Coello said. "It made me feel very valuable; not because I'm very smart, but because I'm doing a job that wasn't already there."
Dr. Coello was introduced to Shoulder to Shoulder by Dr. Jeffery Heck, director of the University of Cincinnati-Franciscan Hospital Family Medicine & International Health Programs.
The two met in 1991 in the northern Honduran city of Yoro.
That's where Dr. Heck had brought a team of Cincinnati doctors for two weeks and where Dr. Coello was spending his required year of medical service after seven years at the national university in Tegucigalpa.
When Dr. Heck returned a year later to set up the program, he found Dr. Coello working at a Seventh-day Adventist hospital in the capital and recruited him to head up the clinic.
Since then, a team of doctors and medical students from the UC Department of Family Medicine has returned every six months to work in Santa Lucia for two-week stints. Villagers now call the neighborhood "Barrio de Cincinnati."
But Drs. Coello and Miguel Cardoza, who joined the clinic three years ago, are regular faces in Santa Lucia.
When the clinic opened, the typical cases were malnutrition, diarrhea and skin infections.
"Because of the lack of education in the area, people were suffering direct consequences of very poor hygiene," Dr. Coello said.
"They were not using clean water, not keeping the animals outside the house or eating food."
Now the doctors treat more chronic problems like high blood pressure and heart conditions. The patients pay a small fee, the equivalent of 40 cents. Residents of surrounding towns visit the clinic. If the patients are more prosperous, the doctors charge prices equivalent to what would be charged in Tegucigalpa. The money is used to pay for poor patients' emergency trips to hospitals in the capital or in La Esperanza, about six hours away by bus.
The presence of the clinic has inspired people to move to Santa Lucia and to build a high school nearby.
One of the most common causes of visits to the clinic remains machete accidents, including among young children who work in the fields.
One recent morning, the family of 4-year-old Wilson Raul Diaz brought him to the clinic on a horse. The tip of a finger on his left hand was hanging by a string of skin after his cousin cut it while playing with a machete.
Within 30 minutes, Dr. Cardoza had it sewn back together.
"When we come here, the medicine is good," said his uncle Roel Diaz.
