Each year in January, HHPF ships a 42-foot shipping container filled with needed supplies to Honduras.  Volunteers in Madison, WI work for the entire year gathering donations, sorting items useful in Honduras medical facilities, elder homes and schools.  All items need to be carefully boxed and documented on a manifest to satisfy the Honduran government procedures for accepting donations.

 

Medical supplies we use in our prolotherapy, vein treatment and ENT surgical clinics are purchased to be sent down due to the specific needs we have.

 

It takes the entire year to do this work to ensure that we send useful items that public hospitals need and depend on us to provide.  Chet Hermansen, a HHPF Board member and longtime HHPF volunteer, along with his son, Eric, manage the logistics of much of the complicated process of gathering, storing and shipping the donations and clinic supplies.

 

Standard Fruit Company, known in the US as Dole, is the largest employer in the areas where we donate items to and where our 3 city clinic sites are located. Many of the patients we treat are field workers in the banana and pineapple plantations.  Standard fruit uses shipping containers to transport the ripe bananas and pineapples to North America.   For nearly 20 years, Standard Fruit has generously donated the use of a shipping container to HHPF for the foundation to transport our supplies going to Honduras.

 

Bananas and pineapples are loaded into shipping containers in Honduras and then transported across the Gulf of Mexico to several large shipping ports in the US.  Once the containers are trucked from the ports to their distribution centers around the US and Canada, the empty container is then trucked to Madison.  Typically on one of the coldest, snowiest Saturdays in January, the empty container arrives in Madison for loading!

 

The majority of the HHPF members are not located in Madison, so we all send out the call to our neighbors, family, co-workers and friends that we need people to load the container!  We usually have 30 to 40 people arrive at Chet’s warehouse by 7:00 am on that cold Saturday morning.  Interestingly, the majority of the volunteers come to help year after year – even though most of the volunteers have never had the opportunity to go Honduras with us – but they recognize the need in Honduras and want to help.

 

Even with the generous donation of the container and cargo shipping across the Gulf by Standard Fruit, and the many donations of supplies, HHPF still has the expense of moving the container by truck and the multiple fees for Customs and the Honduran government, typically amounting to approximately $6,000 for every annual shipment.

 

The public hospitals, schools and our Honduras patients depend on HHPF for our continued support.