“Cruise with a Mission” offers free medical care
They are back for the second year in a row and if you wanted a free medical check up, today was your lucky day. “Cruise with a Mission” in collaboration with the Central Health Region, the Ministry of Health, CitCo and the Belize Union of the Seventh Day Adventist, facilitated the visit of over one hundred physicians, paediatricians and medical experts from the United States to offer free medical examinations to residents. And according to Physician, David Ahn, “Cruise with a Mission” is exactly what they are about.
David Ahn, Physician, Cruise with a Mission
“Everyone pays their own way to come here and we’ve come aboard a cruise ship and it allows us to get from port to port when we do these one day missions. Basically what we are doing is in addition to the medical mission that we have, we also have a few people going to orphanages and doing some construction projects, painting and things like that. This is our main project here at the City Center with our medical and dental teams. Unfortunately, the dental team this year is limited to preventive things like education on how to brush, giving out toothbrushes and toothpaste and things like that. From the medical standpoint, we also due to the short length of our trip we don’t have a whole lot in the way of supplies and equipment so we are not able to do anything in depth, surgeries anything like that. We do have family physicians, I’m a paediatrician myself, we have an obstetrician, gynecologist, and what we’re doing is we’re trying to take care of people’s immediate needs. If there is medication that they need, vitamins that they need, if there is medical advice on how to prevent illnesses or rather improve their control. We have antibiotics, antifungal, anti-parasitic medications, we have pain medication some asthma medication and some topical creams and things like that that we are handing out. So far, I’ve been seeing kids and the main problem seems to be asthma but for the adults there are various pains, aches and those are probably the majority of the things that we’re seeing today. We find that in serving we are blessed much more that we are ever able to help.”
The Mission is a service that Pastor White of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in the U.S. began over twenty years ago and has now been brought to Belize for the second year.
