Mission trip offers experience for local student
Doctors, nursing students journey to Belize.
by Melody Brumble - published on Thursday 7/5/2001.
Section: Local of the Shreveport Times

Keithville resident Stephen Whiddon has gained a new appreciation for the comforts of home after participating in a medical mission trip to Belize this summer.

 

Whiddon, who graduated from Panola College in Carthage, Texas, in May with an associate degree in nursing, was among 23 volunteers for Project Belize, a Nacogdoches, Texas-based medical mission group. This is the first year Panola College students participated.

 

"I have never been out of the Ark-La-Tex," Whiddon said. "This was a chance for me to go somewhere. It's an experience I could never replace anywhere else."

 

The 15-year-old nonprofit organization provides basic medical and dental care to residents of remote villages in southern Belize. The organization was started by doctors, dentists, nurses and social workers, some of whom teach at Panola College and Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.

Nursing students have been included the past seven years, coordinator Bruce McNellie said. "They get to actually practice primary health care."

 

Dr. Barbara Cordell, the Panola College nursing program director, has participated in Project Belize for seven years. She wanted to include her students because the trips "broaden their world view.

"We talk about international nursing, about how things aren't done the same in other countries as the U.S."

 

The trip was a cultural eye-opener for Whiddon, who works at a Bossier City dialysis clinic.

"You're never going to be prepared for what you see. I was thinking, "I'm so poor.' I lived in a little bitty trailer behind my parents' house while I was going to school. They (people in Belize) live in grass huts."

Whiddon and other nursing students assessed hundreds of Belize residents for basic ailments. "We saw a lot of respiratory infections, pneumonia, pink eye, intestinal worms," Whiddon said. "Everybody over there is anemic. They have a low-iron diet, rice and beans and corn. They have chickens and pigs but don't eat them because that's a sign of stature."