Partners for Medical Relief Trip One for February 2019 began in the icy north of the US with many people left behind one, or two days. Fifty of us in all, 11 arrived one day late Friday and five arrive on Saturday, instead of Thursday. We used Southwest, American, United, Delta and flew from New Jersey and Oregon and Iowa and lots from Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana. Lets not forget Florida and Indiana and North Carolina and Colorado and….

Once at the Airport landing between 12:15 and 2:30 PM Thursday, we had a brief orientation before loading four vans and heading to Corozal City and Tonys Hotel and Beach Resort.

After a good meal and a good nights sleep everyone headed to bed and awoke to a wonderful sunny day in Belize. The sun is up at 6 and breakfast is at 6:30 AM. Meeting everyone and finding all the bags and getting some sense of organization is the goal before heading to the hospital to find the patients who will be hernia surgical patients. Over a dozen stayed behind at Tonys to count medicine in anticipation for four days of large villages. The team has six village doctors and two surgeons with four anesthesia doctors. nearly a dozen and a half nurses and lots of techs and pharmacists and non medical support volunteers.

New friends at breakfast

Tonys set up multiple large tables for the team

Parking lot after breakfast

Organizing medicine for village days and student bags for dinner party

Today we headed back to the airport to get 8 people and on the way, we saw an amazing picture that tells the economic story of our region. The north plains area is mostly sugar cane field after sugar cane field. Most people are employed in sugar cane cutting or transportation. Here is a rare picture that shows cane cutters cutting cane by hand in the field, a mechanized cane loading claw, a cane truck (which we see all the time on all the roads) and the only sugar cane factory in Belize in  the background.

Sugar cane is the Second GNP source, second only to tourism in Belize