Field Team to Island of Amapala

MEDICO's first field team of 2007 began their journey to the Island of Amapala in Honduras on Sunday, January 14th under the team leadership of Executive Director and Co-founder, Lynda Peters and MEDICO veteran volunteer and Operating Board member, Tony Ciccariello. This team, which included many long-time veteran field team members, is working in an area of Honduras not visited by MEDICO in several years. The last field team visit transformed the lives of some 1,600-plus villagers living on this island and expectations are for a similar impact. Our next blog post will reflect some of the comments and pictures immediately upon their return on Sunday, January 21st. MEDICO had to make an adjustment to the travel schedule for this team as the flight cost increases for leaving on Saturday were staggeringly higher than on Sunday.

In other MEDICO news our 2006 Annual Review has finally gone to press and is expected to be made available to the public in print form and PDF format via our MEDICO website as of the first of February. We are extremely proud of this report which features many powerful photo images taken by field team members, statistics pulled together from data collected throughout 2006, graphs and charts illustrating fiduciary responsibility of MEDICO, quotes and comments about the work of MEDICO, and listings of MEDICO field team members in 2006 and of our many donors who, through their finiancial support, empower the work of MEDICO. Special thanks to the individuals and groups of individuals who financially supported the printing of this Annual Review.

MEDICO is making a commitment to our field team medicine formulary. We have seen the importance of narrowing our scope of medicines taken into the field to a more usable list of medicines, items that will be more intentional in use and that can be acquired and transported more easily. This process of developing a formulary is not without careful scrutiny of the many doctors who precscribe these medicines and we thank all those who have offered thoughts and opinions about medicines taken into the field. As a facet of developing this formulary we are deeply thankful for the passionate work provided by Board of Regents members Manu Suarez and Julie Walraven. They have thoughtfully taken the Pharmacy arm of our MEDICO field teams into consideration, developing protocol and systems to manage an efficiently run area of service.

Be sure and stay tuned to the MEDICOblog next week for interesting stats, commentary, and pictures from our first team of 2007! With you we celebrate the efforts of humanitarian service in this wonderful area of our globe.

BKCrowe
Director of Operations