Support Mano a Mano's Aviation Program in Bolivia

Mano a Mano’s primary goals are to: • Reduce the incidence of premature mortality in rural Bolivia. Through its community clinic and sanitation programs Mano a Mano has made substantial strides toward meeting this goal in the communities it serves • Expand the economies of poor, isolated Bolivian communities through increasing food production and access to markets for their produce. After the first harvest following use of its newly constructed water reservoir, the income of farmers in the community served by the reservoir doubled. In 2002, Mano a Mano initiated an aviation program to make it possible to work with communities whose distance from the city would otherwise prohibit their inclusion in Mano a Mano’s projects. The program began by purchasing flight hours from another non-profit organization that owned a six-passenger aircraft. By the end of its first year, the aviation program had made a demonstrable and dramatic difference in Mano a Mano’s capacity to serve isolated communities in greatest need. In 2005, Mano a Mano received funds to purchase the aircraft it had been renting. Building on its experience, Mano a Mano expanded the aviation program and now uses flight hours for these purposes: • Transport staff into remote communities that ask Mano a Mano to partner with them on a clinic or other project. Staff travel to assess the request, organize community residents to work with them on the requested project, transport builders to the site, supervise the work and ensure that the project is maintained and used once it is completed. • Transport volunteer medical specialists into distant communities during weekends to evaluate and treat patients who require more specialized care than can be provided in a community clinic; • Airlift critically ill or injured patients from remote sites to city hospitals for emergency care. When Mano a Mano receives a request for partnership from a community located more than a four-hour drive from its Cochabamba office or in an area in which roads are not currently passable, staff assigned to the project may request air transport to the site. Mano a Mano has constructed eighteen air landing strips in order to access remote areas with the aircraft. The office accountant schedules the aircraft with Mano a Mano - Air Support pilots. The pilots assume responsibility for maintaining the aircraft in conformance with standards of the Bolivian Ministry of Aviation and for flying the aircraft according to the established schedule. Throughout the year, Mano a Mano schedules weekend clinics during which 5-10 physicians, dentists, pharmacists, and other medical specialists travel to remote communities in which specialty care is not available. Often the villages they visit would require 15 or more hours of one-way driving time through mountain roads, making it impossible for these employed professionals to volunteer their services. Use of the aircraft reduces most of these trips to 1 – 2 hours. These volunteers travel with portable equipment, set up make-shift examination rooms in the middle of village squares or nearby fields, and see hundreds of patients during the weekend. All Mano a Mano clinics are equipped with short-wave radios and have contact with the Cochabamba office on a daily basis. When Mano a Mano – Air Support receives a request for emergency patient airlift, one of the pilots responds immediately. Given Bolivia’s dismal transportation infrastructure and the widespread lack of health care facilities, the rescue program encounters many challenges. Last year the office received a call from a Mano a Mano clinic in San Agustin, located a 17-hour drive from Cochabamba. Family members of a patient with severe abdominal pain had rushed him to the community clinic on horseback, their only means of transportation. Recognizing that this patient’s appendix had burst during the long and strenuous journey, the clinic physician immediately phoned for the aircraft and began administering medication. The aircraft transported the patient with his family to a hospital in the city of Potosi. Following an appendectomy and treatment for infection, the patient returned home, grateful that the airlift program had saved his life. A few days later, the pilot received a request to respond to an accident in which a busload of students had veered off a mountain road and rolled over several times, seriously injuring many passengers. He quickly removed the seats from the aircraft and hung hammocks to create a second passenger level. After landing on the road, he flew four students to a city hospital. All survived. To date, the airlift program has transported 477 critically ill or injured individuals to life-saving care, including several women requiring Caesarian sections. Without the program few of these patients could have survived.