One Day at a Time: Health Challenges of Hondurans in Poverty

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by Mr. Angel Rafael Palma, a Honduran medical student at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH). He is affiliated with the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA), cordial partner of The Sting. The opinions expressed in this piece belong strictly to the writer and do not necessarily reflect IFMSA’s view on the topic, nor The European Sting’s one.

Every day, when I step out onto the street, I manage to see it. Hundreds of people work tirelessly to bring food to their homes. Many others resign themselves to appeal to human empathy, to wait for help that arrives some days and not others.

Innate smiles and abundant sweat cloud the reality of empty stomachs and desolate pockets. Their minds can dream but cannot afford the luxury of spending their time on unrealizable wishes. Their eyes cannot shut to any expense, as every penny counts and will make the difference between eating today and enduring hunger tomorrow.

The absence of positive adjectives prevails in every possession restrained by poverty. There is no “healthy meal,” only “a meal”; there is no “nice shirt,” only “a shirt”; there is no “dignified house,” only “a house,” well… if there is one… One has to settle for little, and many times, one has to settle for nothing.

But illness does not understand compassion, and vulnerability is its best friend. It revels in the sadness and weakness that poverty accompanies. The unsanitary conditions so common in low-income areas are just the nest of a layered problem that hinders proper access to health and worsens the economic crisis.

Every healthcare center in my country witnesses daily the helplessness of families, whose unity is jeopardized by the lack of resources to access care, diagnostic methods, and appropriate treatments to cure or improve the quality of life of patients in critical condition. Often, they must sacrifice their belongings and all their money in the hope that it will help, but even then, it is not always enough.

I would like to believe that this is only limited to life-or-death situations, but it would be foolish to overlook the endless list of people diagnosed with different types of diseases who abandon their treatment becausee they cannot afford it, choosing to allocate the little money they have for their own and their family’s food, even if it means a worse long-term prognosis and exposing themselves to activities that worsen their health to earn that money.

Honduras has a primarily public healthcare system but is unable to provide all the resources citizens need, placing on their shoulders the responsibility to ensure the full restoration of their health, which the individual conditions of the majority can never achieve.

Poverty is a social disease that prolongs the suffering associated with all other diseases. Solutions are available, but the collective will to implement them is scarce. Nevertheless, action is imperative to prevent poverty from compelling us to endure life one day at a time.

About the author

Angel Rafael Palma is a Honduran medical student at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), passionate about science, knowledge and helping others.He is also an instructor for Physiology and Embryology labs at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the UNAH. Currently, he serves as the National Officer for Outgoing Research Exchanges (NORE-Out) at IFMSA-Honduras, with a dream of contributing to the growth of future doctors in his country and one day improving the quality of life for all Hondurans.He can be contacted via email on arpalmac@unah.hn and can be found in almost any social media as @arafaelhn