Minnesota Rotary

Two days after the Maine Rotary Club left, the Minnesota Rotary Club (which has been coming to Santa Barbara for almost 20 years) showed up. In October three of them had come down to set up this trip, so Katie and I had already met with them and knew how much fun they were. This time they brought about 20 people with them, including doctors, dentists and a construction team. They spent two weeks pulling teeth in the rural villages, doing surgeries at the hospital, training local firemen and ambulance crews, working in the ER and repairing roofs of schools. Five Peace Corps volunteers from Santa Barbara spent the two weeks with them working as translators and thoroughly enjoying their company.

The first week I worked with Dr. Andrew Will, a physiatrist from Minnesota. We worked in a local orthopedic clinic and saw patients for free for two days. Most people came in complaining of lower or upper back pain mostly caused by herniated disks. For most of the cases surgery wasn’t necessary, just physical therapy, anti-inflamatories, ice and possibly steroids. I told Dr. Will that he should just refer all his patients to do yoga since all the physical therapy exercises are yoga moves. It was interesting to see people’s MRIs and learn how to read them and learn how to test for which nerve is being pinched. The best part of the whole thing was that we got to work with Carolina, the physical therapist that works in the office. She was incredibly helpful and was able to learn a lot from the doctor and will be around to follow up with all the patients we saw. The more I work with medical brigades the more useless I think they are if they don’t involve some education component for the local care providers.


One day we went to Buena Vista, a community where we have Agua Pura filters and where the Minnesota club is trying to fund a water system to do a good old-fashioned medical brigade. Show up with lots of docs, ask people their problem and give them aspirin and vitamins and sometimes refer them to go to the hospital in Santa Barbara (2-3 hours away depending on what season it is). I think that this type of activity is pretty much worthless because they are just putting temporary fixes on underlying problems and reinforcing dependency on foreigners.

The second week I worked with Dr. Joe Corser in the ER of the hospital. Dr. Corser is awesome and I got to see some interesting cases and learned some new technical vocabulary.
Dr. Joe Corser & Allison

Although it was fun for us and the ER staff liked having us there because we could help see patients I think it was pretty worthless; there was nothing that we could do that the Honduran staff couldn’t do faster.

The dentists went to different communities every day to pull teach. I think that this is useful because it fixes a pressing and usually painful problem that would otherwise probably go untreated. Pulling teeth coupled with giving toothbrushes and oral hygiene education is useful. The dentists told us about an interesting phenomenon that they have encountered during these types of dental brigades. Some women come in and ask to have their front teeth pulled even if they are perfectly healthy in order to give better blow jobs. Whether to pull or not turns into a moral dilemma for the dentists. Some argue that if a patient wants her teeth pulled the dentist should do as she asks and not make a moral judgment about the motive of the patient. Also, pulling the teeth could be seen as a form of birth control, and thus worthwhile. Other dentists refrain from doing it because they think it is wrong to pull healthy teeth when they have limited time and resources. Interesting dilemma…