#roatan #honduras #utila #emergency #fire #medical #caribbean #caribbeantiktok #caribbeantiktokeurs #islandlife #dogood

A horrible tragedy has occurred on Roatan. This is the public hospital burning to the ground. That public hospital is the only public hospital on Roatan. There are other hospitals, but they are private, and so they provide services to the more wealthy of the Hondurans, as well as immigrants, and so this was the backbone of providing medical services to many of the island inhabitants, and it is gone now. The fire started in the pediatrics unit and then spread, and these show the attempts to stop the fire, as well as the devastation that occurred. The Honduran government has responded by moving in a mobile hospital, so this would be something similar to what Dr. Elizabeth Yu worked at in Iraq. It's a mobile military hospital. They are setting up to try and deal with it. The private hospitals are also opening their doors, but they have limited capacity, and so medical care on Roatan is going to be a problem. In the works was a plan for a new hospital, but the Minister of Public Health has said that's going to be at least 17 months, even on an accelerated schedule, before they can get that done, so this is going to be a major problem for them. They also lost about $680,000 worth of medication and equipment that they desperately needed. The last time something happened like this was on Guanaha when a fire took out their clinic, and we went to the clinics that we help here in Utila, and when we went back, we found out they had nothing left because they had given everything they desperately needed, they gave it to Guanaha, and I'm sure the same is going to help here. If you would like to help our clinics, on my LinkedIn is a wish list for the medical clinics with the medications and the equipment that they are asking for. I'm sure many of that will now find its way over to Roatan. Also, when you order that stuff, it gets staged in Phoenix and then brought down. We're going to need help getting things down here, so if you are traveling to Roatan, either on a cruise or flying, and you are from Phoenix, please reach out to me. We could really use the help getting some of this equipment and medical supplies down here.