A Letter from Director Doug Stockman

Thank you for visiting our web site. We hope you will take the time to learn more about our project in San Jose San Marcos de la Sierra in rural Honduras, Central America. I am the Director for Global and Refugee Health in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY. We are committed to improving the health of under-served populations both in the US and abroad. As part of our mission to the under-served, we have partnered with a rural community in Honduras. Our shared goal is to improve the health of the rural poor in Honduras using low cost sustainable interventions. Our long term hope is to help the rural Hondurans become self sufficient with as little external resources as necessary.

Preventing illness before it happens is a more cost effective solution than always trying to cure an illness after it happens. Diarrhea is a great example of this concept. In developing countries, drinking water contaminated with bacteria and parasites is one of the leading causes of diarrhea, and diarrhea is estimated to kill more than 2 million children in our world today. Infra-structure development, such as latrines, improved water systems and basic hygiene education can significantly reduce the risk of diarrhea. This means less children get diarrhea and therefore many childhood deaths will be prevented. These interventions are more cost effective than curative medicines for diarrhea – which often do not help anyway. Therefore, many of our interventions are directed towards infrastructure improvements. Although we do provide curative care year round, we want to break the cycle of poverty and disease through prevention.

The old proverb of “You give a man a fish and he has a meal. You teach a man to fish and he has food for life” is at the core of our approach in Honduras. We are not the experts and San Jose is not our home. The local people must become self-sufficient. Therefore, we keep interventions low cost and low technology and the Hondurans often direct the interventions. This enables us to pass off both the work and the responsibility to the Hondurans. We become advisors. At some point we anticipate the San Jose people will be fully self-sufficient and will make the leap to help train surrounding communities on what they learned.

Many people that hear about our project ask how they can help. Consider donating by either a direct financial contribution, or by shopping at one of our supporting retailers using one of the links on our Web site. As an example, by clicking on the Amazon link on our Home Page, four percent of your purchase price will be donated by Amazon to our Honduran project – at no cost to you! . Because organizational overhead is paid by another funding source, 100% of the proceeds go back to Honduras to fund many of the projects you can read about on this web site.

If you are a student, consider volunteering your time by fund-raising or becoming involved with one of the many initiatives taking place in San Jose.

Sincerely,

Doug