Three graduates of Butler County Community College’s registered nursing program will travel to Central America later this month to help kids from Honduras.
Sisters 23-year-old Ashley Brehm, 21-year-old Alycia Brehm and their mother Joyce will travel with other volunteers from Butler’s First United Methodist Church to mentor 43 children displaced by their parents.
The kids live in the village of Talanga, which is a 12-acre compound in the mountains.
The trip to Talanga will be the fourth for Ashley, who during the 2016 trip saved the life of an 18-year-old Honduran who was experiencing severe respiratory distress.
Data shows 61-percent of the people in Honduras are living in poverty- with one in five rural Hondurans surviving on less than $2 per day.
The poverty, said Joyce Brehm, who with her daughters lives in West Sunbury, “is incredible. It is so hard to even describe. When we all came back from our first trip and we sat down with my husband and son to try to describe what we experienced, you could tell they couldn’t understand what we saw.”
The trip to Talanga will be the fourth for Ashley; the third for Alycia, a member of BC3’s Class of 2018; and second for Joyce, a 1991 BC3 graduate. They will be joined by Deborah Kruger, of Lyndora, an instructor in BC3’s humanities and social sciences division, making her fifth trip; and her husband, Dr. Randy Kruger, director of BC3’s physical therapist assistant program, making his fourth.
Holly Schaefer, 21, of Butler and a 2018 BC3 graduate with degrees in psychology and social work, will be making her second trip to Honduras; and Ashley Nagle, 19, of Chicora, a BC3 general studies student, making her first.
“I am going because I know that by helping one person, you are not changing the world,” Nagle said, “but you are changing the world for that one person.”
Each will pay approximately $2,000 to mentor the children, a portion of which is offset by yearlong fundraising. The Brehms, graduates of Moniteau High School, work at Butler Memorial Hospital, Joyce and Ashley in the emergency department, and Alycia as a nursing assistant until she takes her National Council Licensure Examination, after which she hopes to be assigned to medical-surgery.
That seven of the 12 volunteers bound for Central America have ties to BC3 speaks volumes about the college’s faculty, staff and student involvement in the community, Deborah Kruger said.
“We have students who are very outreach-oriented,” Deborah said. “We promote that with the students. Every year that we go there we have multiple adults and students who went to BC3, some of them in the 1980s. I think students learn at BC3 what it means to participate in community outreach.”
Components of BC3’s psychology and sociology programs, Schaefer said, “are outreach-oriented.”
“And I try to continue with that myself,” Schaefer said.
The July 28 to Aug. 4 trip marks the sixth year in which First United Methodist Church has sent volunteers through World Gospel Mission, Marion, Ind., to Project Manuelito, where “We will do whatever is needed,” Randy said. “Hanging drywall, digging, wall-building, painting, cleaning, wiring. We aren’t sure what our work project will be. But whenever the kids are not in school, we are with them. We are immersed with them.”
Their purpose, Joyce said, is to build relationships with children ages 5 to 18 who may encounter foreign volunteers only six weeks a year – and not necessarily to spearhead medical care for the youths.
However, the medical care provided by her daughter, Ashley, who during the 2016 trip was without her mother and sister, saved the life of Ricky, an 18-year-old asthmatic Project Manuelito resident who on the night of Aug. 9, 2016, experienced severe respiratory distress.
Joyce Brehm, center, of West Sunbury, is flanked by her daughters, Ashley, left, 23; and Alycia, 21, on the main campus of Butler County Community College on July 10, 2018. The Brehms, all graduates of BC3’s registered nursing program, are among seven volunteers with ties to the college who this month will return to Honduras, where they will aid former street children and where Ashley in 2016 saved the life of an 18-year-old resident of Project Manuelito.
Submitted photo.
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