In Tela, where our medical teams stayed so many times, they had one little public hospital and one doctor……Dr. Gunera. He and I had become good friends. One time he came to the US to attend a medical seminar in Las Vegas for a week. At the end of the week he came back through Dallas and had his wife fly up from Honduras and meet him there. The two of them stayed for a week on my ranch. I loaned them one of our vehicles and they had a great time touring all over north Texas.
Shortly before I met him, he and his whole family were led to the Lord in their home by a very interesting fellow. This fellow is famous all over Mexico, Central America and South America. He had a radio show that was listened to by millions of people there five days each week. He was originally from Argentina, and Argentin Spanish sounds particularly well over the radio. He went with me on two medical trips, and all the ladies in particular there knew him and adored him. He transcribed the show at a studio in the Mid-cities between Dallas and Ft. Worth. He did not preach, he did not give any opinions, he did not teach, he just read the bible.
I never realized how many people, particularly the women in the Hispanic world on our continent cannot read. And even if they can, they cannot read well enough to understand the bible. They just religiously listened to him reading the bible to them. He had quite a useful radio ministry.
Dr. Gunera loved tennis and played with me on my court on my ranch. And in Tela there was a tennis court left over from the days United Fruit was headquartered there. Every time I went down, I would take him a supply of tennis balls which were non-existent for purchase in Tela.
I would go down there two or three days before our medical teams were to arrive. Dr. Gunera and I would go out and select the sites for the clinics. They had Public Health ladies scattered out across the country-side. We would have them pass out numbers to the people who were the most in need of treatment. That way things were much more orderly for the clinics. If you had no number, you were not seen.
It was also absolutely heart rending to see ladies with little babies in their arms who may die if they did not get certain of our medicines, like a series of anti-biotics to kill an infection. And they did not get a number. And by late in the afternoon, the doctors and nurses and dentists were just absolutely totally fatigued from all the work they had put in, especially in that heat. They just had to leave and go back and get refreshed for the next day at a new location.
When I would stay to gather up all the equipment, those ladies would not say a word, but would “speak and plead” with me with their eyes. It is hard to describe, but sometimes even now, I wake-up in the middle of the night seeing those pleading eyes.
None of these People got a Number, but they are Just Hanging Around Hoping to get nto the Clinic, Someway!
The Public Health ladies also had the authority to send people who were very ill in to Dr. Gunera’s little hospital. He did not do major operations, and he had only a very limited supply of drugs for them. He had ladies there who were not RN’s but knew enough to help nurse them back to health if at all possible, as best they could.
Most times Dr. Gunera would come help in our clinics when we had them in his area. One day when we were having a clinic fairly close to Tela, they sent out a messenger for him to come back to town. At that time the Communists had taken over Nicaragua and the KGB contingent there was trying to take over Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala and Belize. The US Navy had instituted a program of visiting the different ports up and down the coast in those countries and distributing things like medical supplies as a good-will gesture. Since Tela had a port from which United Fruit still shipped out their bananas, it could take a deep draft ship.
The message for Dr. Gunera was that a full-size US Navy Destroyer was coming in to deliver medical supplies to him. We went together down to the port and arrived just as the Destroyer was docking. The Navy had arranged for the press to be there. There were lots of pictures being taken of Dr. Gunera meeting the ship’s officers and of the Mayor of Tela meeting them too.
But what Dr. Gunera was interested in was what may be coming off that ship. We stood there together watching as rows of sailors were carrying boxes of medical supplies down the wharf. I was watching Dr. Gunera as his face just fell from its previous expression of expectation. The Navy had nothing there that he really needed. They had boxes and boxes of plastic pulmonary devices that the Navy probably did not want and that he had little use for either, though they looked impressive for the attending press. I had already gotten him a huge supply of Tylenol from a US company, so he did not need the boxes and boxes of Tylenol that the sailors were bringing down. What he really needed was all kinds of anti-biotics, but they were not on the Destroyer.
I determined to go back and contact the Navy and find the officer in charge of that program and tell him that they were not really helping. I did find him and he already knew. He was very apologetic. But he knew how the system worked. He did promise that he would do his very best to get Dr. Gunera a supply of things that he really needed.
So, while we were standing there at the wharf, I asked Dr. Gunera what single thing he needed more than anything else. He was quick with the answer…..anti-venom. They have a pit-viper down there called a Yellow Beard. It gets its name from the yellow strip around its bottom lip. They are called pit-vipers because their head is indented or concave. That allows them to sense heat from a mammal or a human leg and strike in the dark. In the US our pit-vipers are rattle snakes, water moccasins, and copper heads.
Dr. Gunera said that the yellow beards were so deadly that of all those people who had been bitten in his area, only three had made it to his hospital without dying, and that all three of those died after they arrived. They are a particular scourge to the ladies who work in the rice fields.
Anyway, the Navy officer promised to try his best to get Dr. Gunera some anti-venom.
True Texan Tales 