SANTA ROSA DE COPAN, HONDURAS — Alex is being released today from Hospital de Occidente. But right now, he’s lying on a bed in the men’s surgical ward, where 22 beds sometimes are filled with 30 patients or more, some two per single bed. They come for a variety of reasons, everything appendicitis to pancreatitis, from burns to car accidents to gunshot wounds. And for more than a dozen years this ward — with no air conditioning and just one common bathroom — has been tended to by head nurse Doris Ramirez…Source: www.the-daily-record.com

Daily Record reporter Tami Mosser spent time in Honduras with CAMO and gives a peek into the lives and living conditions there.Source: www.the-daily-record.com

SANTA ROSA de COPAN, HONDURAS — They assemble every morning at 6 to share breakfast, a quick devotion and the day’s announcements at a hotel in the center of the oldest section of Santa Rosa, a bustling city of 60,000 in the mountains of western Honduras.

And then it’s off to work for the day for the two dozen medical professionals and support staff in the city this week to volunteer with the Orrville-based Central American Medical Outreach …Source: www.the-daily-record.com

CONCEPCION, HONDURAS — Rene Madrid was living in a small one-room shack, no larger than a single-car garage, with no water, no bathroom, no kitchen, no food and no hope. Madrid, who is 53 but looks much older, is a paraplegic. He fell, he said through an interpreter, “working on the side of a mountain.” Most likely, this was a result of working on a coffee farm, where the plants grow on steeply sloped mountains. Madrid lives in Concepcion, a village of just 83 in the Intibuca district of Honduras …Source: www.the-daily-record.com

SANTA ROSA de COPAN, HONDURAS — Even though a nurse promised her “no shots and no ouchies today,” Maria Francis was crying. She sat on her mother’s lap, repeatedly turning her face away from everyone trying to talk to her, to tell her how pretty she looked. And one hand — sometimes both — stayed clamped over her mouth. The 12-year-old was the first patient of the day to be seen by Columbus pediatric plastic surgeon Dr. Greg Pearson, who was working from a small exam room in a consultation building right behind Hospital de Occidente, the largest such public facility in western Honduras …Source: www.the-daily-record.com