August 2019
Linda Kennedy was briefly in El Rosario with Kerry Laufer from the Tuck School of Business Global Onsite program known as TuckGO and Dr. Suyapa Bejarano of La Liga Contra Cancer in San Pedro Sula Honduras. The primary purpose was to orient Kerry to Honduras in general and El Rosario in advance of a fall semester academic/consulting program for Tuck MBA students who will be considering a tentative value proposition for maquila (factory) owners in San Pedro. The question is whether La Liga Contra Cancer can effectively expand and transfer the highly successful Jornada Cancer Screening Programs that were developed in El Rosario in partnership with local leaders from 2013-2018.
While in El Rosario, Linda had foundational meetings with local leaders for consideration of several new initiatives being launched in 2019-2020. These include Taking Care of Moms (TCOM), which is a series of ten programs over a year designed to engage young first-time mothers in learning about how to care for themselves and the new baby. TCOM is generously funded by the Krasnoff Foundation and headed by ACTS pediatrician Jinny Brack. Nurse Nolvia will a key program leader.
Linda also met with the Patronato (like a town council) in the village of El Chaguite to propose a fast-track plan over the coming year to build one latrine for each of the 130+ families living in the community. At this point, only five families have sanitary facilities. They were enthusiastic about working together in teams to build the latrines en masse and already discussing how to divide the homes by sector and build sequentially.
At the Clinic, Linda introduced ACTS’ new Special Needs Fund to be allocated at the discretion of the Clinic Committee and medical staff for unanticipated medical expenses related to challenging or complicated medical cases. This was good news and Clinic President Nelson Mejia noted that they are caring for an infant with congenital gastrointestinal defects who needs specialty formula for tube feeding. Additionally, with the help of Dr. Suyapa, ACTS supplied IUDs and the instruments needed for insertion to provide an additional, long term, option for family planning.
Finally, it was about ten months after the 2018 corn harvest crisis and ACTS’ unbudgeted provision of $25,000 for essential materials to plant the follow-on crop of beans. The agricultural leaders reported that 311 families had received aid and fortunately there was normal rainfall after planting that helped the bean crop to mature properly. 2018 was a near disaster and in search of a more permanent solution, Linda let the group know that ACTS had tasked Dan Saulnier and Betsy Rybeck Lynd with investigating long term systemic opportunities to make water for agriculture available more predictably. In the short run, the farmers were delighted to hear that Ethan LaRochelle and Brad Taylor would be collaborating to install a weather station that would be linked to the soon-to-arrive internet and allow access of satellite information on coming weather. Knowing about rainfall coming prior to planting will help farmers decide when to prepare the fields, a laborious process with a machete, and when to put seeds in the ground.
