This past summer, Oklahoma Christian University nursing students had the opportunity of a week-long mission trip to Honduras and surrounding areas to serve alongside Honduran healthcare professionals in various capacities throughout multiple cities and towns in the country. Students were hosted by the Baxter Institution, a Christian educational institution based in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, which is training the next generation of Spanish-speaking ministers, missionaries, and teachers to serve God’s kingdom throughout Central and South America.
Mel Latorre, college of Bible faculty member and co-teacher of “Healthcare Missions and Christian Service,” accompanied students on the mission trip this past summer. As a part of the class on campus leading up to the trip, students work on a project that they want to implement on their mission. In the past, students created handouts on blood pressure and heart health translated in Spanish. Other students created first aid kits with instructions on how to properly dress a wound. Latorre spoke about his experience leading students through the course and trip to apply their learning to real life situations.
“The class kind of anchors the collaboration and integration of nursing and faith,” said Latorre. “We talk about the impact of nursing as a calling, as part of God’s redemptive plan, not just a career. We talk about issues like medical missions, poverty, social challenges, and part of that class, they have to get so many clinical hours that they can either get on one of these trips, medical mission trip, Honduras being one of them, or they can get it stateside in some nonprofit clinics,” he said. “So we have the whole class leading up to those experiences that we’re talking about the intentionality of integrating faith and the reason that we should go and help people, so that’s already kind of preloaded. Then once they get there, they do the mechanics of it, then every night we have a debriefing and a devotional. We’ll talk about what we learn, where we see God, what were the differences, the challenges, the similarities to healthcare here. What does it look like to do this kind of work as a calling instead of just a career,” he said.
Latorre said that at the Baxter Institute, Oklahoma Christian students and faculty all stayed in the on-campus housing with access to the cafeteria and medical facilities where they prepared to go out for medical missions and mobile clinic trips. The mobile clinic trips included traveling to areas two or three hours away to conduct check ups on people who would otherwise not have access to healthcare. Students saw between four hundred and five hundred patients in the week that they served.
“So these are mostly poor folks that wouldn’t have too much access to it. So we’re doing the service. Our nursing students get a very raw, real, you know, in the trenches kind of experience. Often it’ll be under a tree and we will set up a little tent, or we will use some classroom of one of the churches. So that’s kind of the place we’re doing this,” he said. “So then we talk about you know what it looks like to be, not just a good nurse, but a nurse that is an agent of betterment. That you’re there representing God’s grace and love, and so these trips are really, really cool for that.”
Teagan Cain, a senior nursing student who served in Honduras this past summer, spoke about her experience as a student on this trip.
“We got to do screenings in the mobile clinics, and we had access to a pharmacy station where we got to help write or fill their prescriptions. So we had a pharmacist with us who helped us if we needed help, but it was really cool to get to fill prescriptions because as nurses, we don’t typically get to do that. So it was cool to be a part of that,” she said. “One day we went to a school and did a screening there… We gave parasite medications, because the water there has parasites, so every six months they get parasite medication to help detox their bodies. We had another station where they got fluoride on their teeth. The kids were really sweet and we got to play with them for a lot of it, and try to communicate the best we could with them, but it was really fun,” she said.
Cain spoke about the impact that this trip made on her perspective of healthcare in the United States.
“Personally, I didn’t realize how poor of a community it was, and how thankful we should be for the facilities we have here health-wise. We went to a government issued hospital there, and they were very poor. They didn’t have easy access to anything. So even though healthcare in the United States is expensive, you know you’re going to be treated well, and you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll be able to have access to those things. You know that at least you’ll get the best care that you can,” Cain said. “It was just a really cool trip overall. And we got closer with our nursing class because you spend a whole week with them, more than just an hour or two in class every day, and so it was really cool. I would recommend it to anybody.”
Through the Oklahoma Christian nursing program, students are equipped not only to be competent in their field, but to bring the Kingdom of God with them everywhere they go.
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