Portfolio Sampler

TRACY MORRIS

A group of unlikely "missionaries" had a life-changing experience recently in Honduras.

Individuals from the Spring and Woodlands area gathered in Tegucigalpa in mid-July at Clinica Cristiana Cuerpo de Cristo to deliver food, clothing, shoes and medical services in the remote mountain villages of the country's interior.

The initiators of the trip, Lynn Rippelmeyer and Joy George, are members of Northwoods Unitarian Universalist Church in the Woodlands. Further, folks from the church are sometimes practitioners of other faiths, church member Tracy Morris said.

"For example, I am Buddhist. The range of faiths at Unitarian Universalist churches in general is such that we had some atheists, certainly agnostics and some deists," she said. "Our host in Honduras is a Christian mission. Many of the Honduran residents we were serving are Catholic, a faith which is defined by the reps from the mission as 'not Christian.'"

Morris went on this trip because she loves to travel and is always looking for ways to combine travel and her work as a writer. "I told Lynn Rippelmeyer that if she needed a former social worker who speaks a bit of Spanish on the journey, I'd be happy to go," Morris said.

The visuals were breathtaking. Tegucigalpa, where the group stayed at the His Eyes clinic, is a city made up mostly of crowded, cinderblock shanties sprawling along hillsides. A lot of color everywhere, from the lush native "weeds" to the carefully tended gardens to the cinderblock buildings painted pink and aqua and green, Morris said. "Tegucigalpa is surrounded by mountains. Traveling in the mountains was inspiring," she said. "Beyond a few paved highways between the city and the mountains, the roads going up the mountains are unpaved and rocky. It took us many hours to travel a few miles."

Surgical tubal ligation is a common form of contraception. It's a process by which a woman's fallopian tubes are essentially closed off (sometimes referred to as "tied"), preventing the meeting of sperm and ovulated egg. Tubal ligation is performed for women who have given birth to all the children they think they will want in their lifetime.

What happens when that woman later changes her mind and wants to bear more children?

According to expert Dr. Donald Galen, women have the options of in vitro fertilization (IVF) or microsurgical tubal reanastomosis (MTR), both of which can be highly successful.

Galen, who practices at the Reproductive Science Center of the San Francisco Bay Area, is a pioneer in the use of advanced microsurgical techniques to reverse tubal ligation including the daVinci Surgical System which utilizes a robotic arm to perform the most minimally invasive surgery. Dr. Galen performed what is believed to have been the first MTR in the U.S. with the daVinci system, the benefits of which include much smaller incisions and less soreness.

The majority of Galen's MTR patients do not access the robotic arm system, however, because of its higher cost due to location within a hospital, and the fact that success rates for pregnancy are comparable with other microsurgical techniques.

Galen often hears from women who've been told by their ob/gyn's that "re-opening their fallopian tubes is impossible. I think there's just a lack of awareness even among gynecologists of the tremendous success we can have." He reports being able to re-open fallopian tubes for over 90 percent of his patients, and most of them will later conceive. RSC averages an 80 percent pregnancy rate for women under the age of 39 following MTR.

Ah, progress. Love it or hate it, tolerate it or fight it -- it is inevitable, especially in Houston. It's a city that never seems to stop growing and revitalizing. That's a good thing. Still, sometimes it's hard to find the "win-win" in developing situations. Even champions of change know that compromise and concessions typically abound. Just ask the folks at Little Red Schoolhouse in the Meyerland area.

The established private Montessori school has been contending with the good and bad of neighborhood progress for some time now. Initially established in 1960 and located on the edges of the then-premier Westbury Square, the owners and staff packed up and moved in 1994 to their present location in the Maplewood Square Shopping Center at 9730 Hillcroft. Since that time, enrollment has fluctuated along with the area's population yet always remained steady enough to keep its doors open to children from age 18 months to middle school years.

When government funding and bureaucracy appear to dictate how the needs of HIV positive people will be met, the formation and development of the Women's HIV Coalition (WHIVC) in Houston is one example of grassroots efficacy and success.

The Women's HIV Coalition, a special project of Body Positive, is currently under going re-structuring in order to better serve its members and the community. The Coalition is utilizing a modified version of a model presented by the group's 1995 intern from the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work, Thad McLemore.

"Several members had expressed some reservations about the capacity of the organization to take on new projects," reports McLemore. "A model was proposed which should relieve some of the stress and avoid burnout of members by more specifically assigning tasks, like allowing each member to focus primarily on her particular area of interest."

After several weeks of discussion, Coalition members voted to move forward with the structural changes, which should be fully functional by February 1996, after the group's second annual conference.