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Another day, another diver

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(This is the second installment of the behind-the-scenes account of traveling with the NBC crew for the Rock Center story.)

Monday morning dawned early for most of us. The time difference was two hours then (daylight savings time was still on) so even though most of us wanted to sleep to be.

 

It worked out just as well, though. Photographer Bruce Bernstein and soundman/grip Chris Nickless and I were having breakfast around 7 am when Dr. Mejia came to the hotel. He was on the way to the dock to pick up another diver who was arriving right then. The man was more severely injured than the divers the night before. We all jumped into a car and took off for the clinic. 

Dr. Mejia opened his hyperbaric clinic in November of 2009 to treat divers. This diver was his 227th patient in less than two years. He had serious weakness in one leg and no strength at all in the other. He was also unable to urinate on his own. Elmer placed a catheter and began the treatment; another US Navy Treatment Table 6. Dr. Mejia said he believed the diver would make a good recovery. He was already showing signs of recovery after the first few oxygen cycles of the treatment.

This treatment was the 596th time Dr. Mejia had run a treatment since opening the clinic. He averages seven treatments per patient; often multiple divers are in the chamber at the same time. While Dr. Mejia sees the most severe patients, almost always with some level of paralysis and often with bladder control issues, he has had tremendous success. He has an 81 percent success rate of divers leaving the chamber under their own power. Often they need a cane or a walker, but they are in much better shape than when they arrived.

 

What still amazes me is that Dr. Mejia only charges about $300 US per diver. That is for all his care, not per treatment. Care includes treatment, food, lodging, physical therapy, any tests he has to run. Dr. Mejia doesn’t charge the divers. He charges the boat owners, although sometimes they won’t pay. He is reluctant to raise his prices any, however, as he is afraid the boat owners will refuse to pay, or worse will skip treatment all together.

 

I asked Dr. Mejia what he needed. His first answer was a generator. It is Honduras and the power goes out from time to time. He said he was afraid every time he began a treatment at night that the power would go out. He needs a better air compressor, too. The one he has is an industrial compressor, not designed for this type of work at all. He said he needs money for wheel chairs, walkers and canes as well. And shoes. Most of his patients don’t make it to the chamber with shoes as they are taken right off of a boat and brought to the chamber.
But he does an exceptional job with very little. And he keeps doing it because it has to be done.
For anyone who watched the story last night on NBC’s Rock Center and are interested in contributing to help Dr. Mejia, you can do so here.

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Working With NBC

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A little more than a year ago, NationalGeographic.com profiled the problems with the lobster divers in Honduras; they used several of my photographs and quoted Dr. Matias Nochetto from DAN and I about the issue as we were both working on the Harvesting Diver Project.

In September of this year, I was contacted by a reporter from the New York Times who was headed to Honduras on a different story but remembered the NatGeo piece and wanted to do a follow up. That story ran in September (almost a year to the day to after NatGeo).

Just after the NYT story ran, a producer from NBC contacted me to get more background information. Over the next couple weeks I spent approximately 6 hours on the phone with them, talking about logistics and helping them understand the diving situation and terminology. They finally invited me to join their news crew for a few days when they went to Honduras.

And that is how I came to be standing at the airport in San Pedro Sula, Honduras on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by security, a dozen people and more than 35 cases and pieces of luggage. The camera guys had 23 cases of their own just for equipment. I knew this was going to be a completely different trip than any other trip I had made to Honduras…or anywhere for that matter.

Natalie Morales from the Today Show was the correspondent for the story. She is an extremely down-to-earth person and didn’t really want any special considerations. The network was nervous about her being there so they had hired security personnel for the crew and one man, Frank, was her personal security. 

After getting all the equipment and crew packed into five cars, which took a while, we headed out for the two-and-a-half hour drive from San Pedro Sula to La Ceiba where Dr. Elmer Mejia operates a hyperbaric chamber. I’ve written about him several times in this blog previously.

During the drive Dr. Mejia was on the phone with a boat owner. We learned that injured divers were on the way to the chamber. First it was 3, then 4 and finally 5 divers were going to arrive at the clinic. Since the story was developing so quickly, the crew decided to go straight to the dock to pick them up. By the time we got there it was pouring the rain and dark, but the camera guys went down to the docks with Dr. Mejia and got them. The rest of stayed outside as the port security was edgy about too many of us going inside.

With so many injured divers at one time, Dr. Mejia had to put two divers in the outer lock and compress the entire chamber at one time. This is not safe, as there is no way to lock someone in or out of the chamber if there was a problem, but Dr. Mejia felt he didn’t have a choice. After examining each of the divers, four had relatively minor problems, but one had more severe injuries. He began a US Navy Treatment Table 6 at 7 pm. The treatment would not end until nearly midnight.

Day 1 has a happy ending, though, as after a shorter treatment on Monday morning each of the divers was released to go back home. Whether it was the quick treatment or luck, we will never know. Unfortunately, many of the divers don’t have that sort of luck when it comes to dealing with paralysis caused by decompression sickness.

Before the group of five divers left the clinic, Dr. Mejia fed them lunch and got them cleaned up. And then Thelma Sakeyama came to the clinic. She is a special evangelical pastor to the people of La Moskitia. She sang and preached for them and they seemed to appreciate it. Before they left, she took down all of their names.

The next couple posts will detail my experiences with NBC in Honduras to help them tell this story. They asked me at the time not to publish these stories until their story was ready to air. The trip began on a Sunday and I flew home on Thursday afternoon.

For anyone who watched the story last night on NBC’s Rock Center and are interested in contributing to help Dr. Mejia, you can do so here.

Tomorrow, I will post about our first full day on the ground in San Pedro Sula. Stay tuned..

The issue with Miskito divers

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In October, I traveled to Honduras with a news crew from NBC to help them understand the diving issues revolving around Miskito Indians diving for lobster. They often end up paralyzed or dead. The story also profiles an amazing human being, Dr. Elmer Mejia, who has dedicated his professional life to helping these men.  

Much of the background the crew used for the story came from the documentary work I did while working at DAN. They were carrying around copies of articles I wrote for Alert Diver Magazine and had all seen the 10 minute documentary I created while working on my final certificate in the Documentary Arts from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Below are links to some of my blog posts from Honduras and my thoughts and observations on the problems. Tomorrow, after the story airs tonight on NBC’s Rock Center, I’ll begin posting behind-the-scene blogs and photos from the trip. It was fun and interesting to travel with the large news crew. And it was also rewarding to see them begin to appreciate the scale of the problem as we traveled around.

Hyperbaric Clinic in La Ceiba

Purpose

Lobster Symposium.

Changing lives—promises kept

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In June of 2010, I traveled to Puerto Lempira, Honduras to meet with representatives from the Association of Handicapped Miskito Lobster Divers. I wanted to understand the forces that drove them to sacrifice their lives and their health to harvest lobster.

As part of those meetings and discussions, one member of the association told me that other groups had visited with them before, taken pictures and notes and then nothing had come of it. Mentally I promised them that I wouldn’t be one more visitor who simply took from them without giving anything back.
Earlier this month, almost a year to the day from when I visited with the association members, Dr. Elmer Mejia and I conducted training for each of the boat captains so they will better be able to care for divers on board their boats when the inevitable happens. During that training and the accompanying symposium, I also ran into one of the men from the association. We simply said hello, but I wondered if he remembered the discussion we had at the association office.
Dr. Mejia and I also made a series of recommendations that, if enacted, should reduce the risk these divers face daily.  We also recommended that those previously disabled divers should be trained as on-board medics. The idea was that these divers would be dedicated to caring for a diver, and be prepared to administer oxygen, insert a Foley Catheter if necessary and even deliver an IV if it was appropriate. This serves several benefits for the divers. They would have a knowledgeable person on board to take care of them—and someone dedicated to their care, rather than the boat captain. I also can’t think of a better “role model” as a medic than a diver who has been hurt before. “If you don’t want to end up like me, listen to what I say.” That is an extremely powerful testimony.
Overnight, I received word from Dr. Mejia that the boat owners association and the handicapped divers association are working together to make this happen. Small groups of the disabled divers will soon begin traveling to Dr. Mejia’s clinic in La Ceiba to receive 6 weeks of training in diving medicine and caring for injured divers.
As I’ve said many times before there are no easy answers to this problem. But this sure seems like a good start to me.

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Lack of empathy?

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Earlier today, the people who produced the documentary film “Fresh, new thinking about what we’re eating” posted a blog on their website that I wrote about the situation with Harvesting Divers. The documentary film is all about our nation’s food supply and is well worth watching. They are also getting into the realm of sustainable seafood and so they were interested in this topic.

I am grateful for the additional attention this group brought to the issue, bringing it before an entirely new audience. When they posted it, they also posted their link on their Facebook page, again putting the information in front of a new group of people. Read the blog here.

I was surprised, though, by a couple of the comments people posted on Facebook afterward. I realize that not everyone sees the gravity of this situation, understands it, or cares – but this was interesting.

  • How can people working in this industry not understand the dangers?
  • I do sympathize with these divers, but they are making the consious (sic) choice to take this job.
  • For starters, we could reconsider *what* we eat, and take a different job that doesn’t involve taking life like this — yours or the creature’s.
  • Know and respect the dangers… In any line of work! Common sense, too.

The problem is, for most of these men, there aren’t alternatives. They are fishermen. That is all they know. Many are illiterate. They don’t understand what happens to their bodies. Ok, there is actually one alternative – at least for the divers in Honduras. They can get involved in the drug trade, helping to distribute drugs to the US from Colombia.

These are men working in an industrial setting for a company doing hazardous work. I see no difference between this and coal miners in the 20s and 30s, migrant farm workers in the 60s and 70s and sweatshop workers or people working in packing plants today. The only difference is, their actual working environment is even more dangerous –with the exception of the coal mine perhaps.

I just thought we had learned from our mistakes and moved forward, understanding the need for safe working conditions and proper training. I guess not everyone sees things the same way. .

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