“Dr. Nancy Neubauer of Langley, medical director of radiology at Whidbey General Hospital, visits with kids at the San José Orphanage in Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras, home to 20 to 30 infants and children and one of the recipients of aid from CAMO — Central American Medical Outreach. Neubauer and her husband Larry Neubauer are among the volunteers who have pledged five years of commitment to the organization. They are sponsoring a concert as part of their commitment to CAMO.Kathryn Tschiegg was a registered nurse when she volunteered for the Peace Corps in the early 1980s.As trainees we were sent to various places before being assigned, Tschiegg said. One of them was Santa Rosa in Honduras. I saw a hospital that had dogs running around in it, with a one room laundry. Patients were sleeping two to a bed. I thought, ‘God would not be so cruel as to put me here.’Of course it was, in fact, to Santa Rosa that Tschiegg was sent.It was the toughest two years of my life, she said. I saw death on a daily basis. There was no equipment, no tools to utilize my skills. On my last day in July 1981, I carried 31 babies to the morgue.The 20-year-old memory is still indelible. For some years after returning to the United States Tschiegg rejected it. She worked training other nurses, and only went back to Honduras in 1989 as a visitor. What she saw there, however, made forgetting impossible.Things had worsened. There was just dejection and despair, she said. All that she had accomplished through the Peace Corps had made little or no difference. Tschiegg’s life direction did an about-face. After returning to the United States this time, she enrolled at Kent State University and earned a business degree. In 1993 she and 20 friends knocked on doors and raised $20,000 in one evening. They established Central American Medical Outreach and defined its mission: to provide medical education, supplies and equipment to the impoverished of Central America.CAMO is also a prototype for establishing sustainable programs, each one a link in a big chain. Tschiegg contends it is not enough to have medical teams travel to a region, help the people there with their medical skills and then leave.It needs to go full circle, she said. It doesn’t help if the doctors there don’t learn the procedures, she said. Nor is new equipment of any use if no one knows how to use it, or if the building housing it is falling apart.Tschiegg has designed CAMO to work toward completion of the full circle. The organization secures medical equipment, then sends it to Honduras with medical professionals who volunteer their time not only to perform medical procedures, but to train Honduran public health staff to use the donated equipment when the volunteers leave.Another aspect is what Tschiegg calls counterparting. Their doctors and nurses come and study here, and then the instructors go down with us to work with them in Honduras, and act as a liaison when the Hondurans need to consult with them here, she said.Our vision is providing and integrating safe medical equipment, related medical education and volunteer trainers in Central America, she continued. We work in partnership with our developing country counterparts to identify and implement all programs. The vital part of CAMO is its volunteer corps. Medical professionals donate their time with the understanding that they participate in an ongoing program which might require a commitment of one to two weeks per year for five years. Among those volunteers are Dr. Nancy Neubauer, medical director of radiology at Whidbey General Hospital, and her husband Larry Neubauer. The Langley residents first visited Santa Rosa one-and-a-half years ago.Kitchen staff baked bread for 1,000 patients in a mud adobe kitchen, using a slab on a 1902 woodburning stove, Nancy Neubauer said. There was no ventilation, no refrigeration. Rats were running around and the women who were cooking had respiratory problems. The patients were getting sick on the food.The sheets on the bed were rotting, and in the laundry, linens were dried on the floor or outside on the ground.Through CAMO, the Santa Rosa hospital now has a new laundry facility and a new kitchen, as well as a new roof. There is a multidisciplinary breast clinic, with new mammography equipment and doctors trained to use it. And the vision is expanding.We need all the pieces for health care to fit together, Tschiegg said. Among the new programs are wheelchair distribution and repair, a dental program, a pediatric feeding center, eye clinic and surgery, and a warehouse in Honduras where donations can be stored before being distributed.A medical teaching library has been established, and improvement of rural health clinics continues.CAMO provides structure, guidance for ideas, Tschiegg said. There is always someone to evaluate, give information, find a solution. And she pronounced: There are no problems, only solutions. We have to focus on that solution, not on the problems. “