Medical class goes global
Collegians spend break tending to sick in Africa, Honduras

By Melissa Fili
MethuenLife Writer

UMass Lowell student Katie Hutton recently took advantage of her school break by traveling to a far-off locale and immersing herself in the culture.
But this was no college party. She traveled to Ghana, West Africa, as part of Nursing Students Without Borders where she helped tend to thousands of poor villagers seeking medical care and even witnessed one man die — “uncovered and untouched” — in a country that she says doesn’t have the means to care for its people.
Katie is among several Methuen collegians who spent their January break traveling abroad to provide much needed medical care and health education to poverty-stricken regions.
Maria Borrelli, a senior pre-med major at Boston University, spent a week in Honduras’ capital of Tegucigalpa where she was part of a Global Medical Brigade that saw 500 patients a day. Students did triage, took blood pressures and temperatures, and filled prescriptions in a place where, Borrelli explains, “medical care is very do-it-yourself.”
“These people have nothing,” she said. “The goal was to give people preventative medicine to make their lives easier right now. We gave everyone vitamins and parasite medicine, which is the biggest problem there. ... They have no form of water sanitation. Kids are bathing in swamps, people are washing food in water that comes from dirty wells. As a result, there’s lots of constipation and diarrhea.”
Along with her pre-med course load, Borrelli (Central Catholic, Class of 2006) is trained in CPR and first aid. In Honduras, locals soaked up every bit of knowledge she shared.
“The help we could give them mattered. Telling a mom how to re-hydrate her sick son was really rewarding. Swarms of people gathered around me, listening to what I said,” she explained.
Borrelli, the daughter of Beverly and Anthony Borrelli, will return to Honduras in May during the rainy season. The Brigade will rotate their clinics to different sites.
“We’re already talking about bringing mosquito nets to sleep under,” she laughed. “They have lots of funky creepy crawlers around there!”
UMass senior Charly Darius, a 36-year-old native of the Caribbean, said that as the only dark-skinned male student at the Kpando clinics in West Africa, he got a lot of attention from locals seeking medical advice. But when it came to accommodations, he drew the short straw.
“As the only man, I was living by myself in a building that was semi-abandoned. I could smell that people had been sleeping there for a while,” he said.
His bed was a box spring, minus the mattress: “It was so hard. I didn’t sleep for three days.”
But eventually he did, with his workload and 90-degree days wearing him out.
With South Africa having among the world’s highest number of AIDS cases, Darius talked to villagers about sexually transmitted diseases. He also diagnosed diseases at two labs, where there was only one microscope.
“We saw a lot of women with parasites in their hair and malaria,” he said. “We screened for blood sugar, hypertension, high cholesterol — they have it, but don’t treat it. They say, ‘People don’t die of those things.’”
Darius says he made many friends there, and has already heard from one who has a request: “The boy of my host’s family called me a couple times. He needs an MP3 player,” he laughed.
UMass’ Katie Hutton (MHS, Class of 2000) can’t shake several images of Kpando from her mind: the HIV-positive 2-year-old administering her own pill medication; the adult patients who had no idea how old they were; the director of a children’s home who had to be taught that coughing into his elbow is more sanitary than coughing into his hand.
A visit to a home of kids with HIV turned playtime into work.
“The house was very unsanitary and unsafe for kids, especially when immunity is already a problem. It would be shut down in U.S,” she said. Students wrote out a care plan and presented it to the home’s American director but he “didn’t see a problem,” said Hutton, who is the daughter of Arthur and Susan Hutton and big sister to Billy.
Hutton didn’t mind showering out of a bucket or using a hole in the ground as a bathroom, but food was an issue.
“They cooked for us — chicken and rice for two weeks straight. They use a lot of curry, and I don’t like curry,” said Hutton, who “lived off granola bars.”
Melanie Burgess, another UMass senior, was moved by the very first people she met in Kpando — a 50-year-old woman with two small children.
“The girl’s mother died in childbirth, and this woman was raising her,” Burgess, 23, explained. “The girl had a cut on her leg, so we brought her Band-Aids and a puzzle, and the mom was crying and saying how much she appreciated what we did.”
Burgess “absolutely” wants to return to Kpando and says she hopes to focus her nursing career in the area of global studies.
All of the Methuen students said they brought home priceless life lessons.
Burgess said the trip taught her to “value everything you have,” adding that while in her chosen profession many can feel overwhelmed with their patient load, she witnessed six nurses caring for entire villages of people with hardly any medical supplies.
“More needs to be done (in Honduras) to teach them how to take care of themselves,” reflected Borrelli. “Education should be second to giving them money.”
And after seeing death, poverty and a seemingly unending cycle of sub-standard medical care, Katie Hutton said the trip humbled her and she now has a new respect for home: “Methuen looks awesome. I love this place. Now I’m so grateful for where I come from!”