Where The Wild Things Are  

Wow, what a trip!  I’ve thought about one of my granddaughter’s favorite books, Where The Wild Things Are, many times this week.  I’m now resting in the shade in the village of Cola de Cajon.  Our team has just finished up over thirty hours of hiking in the remote Honduran jungles.  This hiking, along with ten hours in four-wheel drive trucks and eight hours in dugout canoes, was necessary for our Extreme Missionary Adventures team to reach the villages where we conducted the first tests of TribalConnection, a live two way video link between needy people in isolated locations and people in the United States willing to help meet these needs.   

Our motto is adventure with a purpose and there was plenty of adventure. While hacking through the steamy jungles we drank fresh, pure water from the ‘water vines’ hanging down from the dense canopy and ate the heart of palm plants that had the texture and taste of cabbage. When one of our team members cut his hand when his hiking stick snapped in two in the middle of a river crossing Juan, our local guide, treated the cut with the sap of a medicine plant.  Then Juan showed us another plant with sap so toxic it can be fatal if it gets on your skin.  The locals smear the sap on the tree limbs above their chicken roosts to kill the bats that come after their chickens.  We scaled steep mountains, bogged up to our knees in muddy swamps and forded dozens of rivers and creeks.  We saw monkeys, toucans, parrots, three kinds of poisonous snakes, crocodiles, and leeches. There were beetles as big as the palm of my hand with huge pincers, inch and a half long poisonous ants that can give a grown man a fever with one bite and ten bites can be fatal and a big, hairy tarantula the size of a pie plate.  The things we did and saw would rival anything on Survivor Man or Man vs Wild.  In fact, Billy Snider, a professional videographer with Fivepointsix Productions, went along to film a pilot video for The Discovery Health Chanel.  They are interested in a possible TribalConnection series combining the adventure aspect with medical help in remote villages. * 

But this is not a bunch of highly trained, ex-Special Forces, adventure racers.  And this was not just adventure for adventure’s sake; it was an adventure with a purpose.  The reason this group of ordinary folks volunteered to invest a week of their lives hacking through the Central American jungle was to bring help to the local people who live without even the basic things we consider necessities of life.  We packed in vitamins, antibiotic cream and parasite medicines to Encanto de Rio Coco.  In Piscina de Pena Blanca our team held a medical clinic where they treated about seventy-five people for a variety of problems.  Carlos, an eight year old boy, came in with an ulcerated sore approximately three inches in diameter on his left leg.  His mother said it started from an insect bite over five months earlier and has continued to grow larger in spite of her attempts at treatment.  Trish, our medical person on the team, was unsure of the diagnosis or best treatment.  That’s where TribalConnection came in.  

Our team brought out the laptop equipped with SightSpeed, a live video conferencing program, and satellite internet equipment to make the first Tribal Connection. In a few minutes Trish was consulting with two doctors in McKinney, Texas.  Trish described the wound and gave the patient history as the doctors viewed the boy and his wound through SightSpeed.  After a few minutes of discussion between Trish and the doctors they agreed it was Leishmaniasas, an insect-born parasitic disease.  This disease is treatable but requires a very specific medicine.  

Without proper treatment Carlos’ wound would have continued to grow and the infection would have spread.  He probably would have lost his leg within a few a months and most likely died within a year.  A visit to the closest clinic would require Carlos and his mother to walk three hours through the jungle to the river where it would cost the equivalent of two months wages to pay for the four hour boat ride. After the boat ride they would still have to somehow cover twenty miles of dirt road from the boat landing to the clinic.  Even if they managed to do all of this the clinic probably would not have a doctor or the needed medicine.  But this story now has a happy ending. Thanks to Extreme Missionary Adventures, TribalConnection and this group of volunteers Carlos is now receiving treatment and is expected to fully recover.