Costa Rica Project

In the spring of 2019 I landed in San Jose, Costa Rica, not knowing exactly what to expect. West Coast Rescue was in its infancy and I was traveling to CR with a friend on a scouting trip, of sorts. I had heard there might be an opportunity to assist rural communities in the south, due to their remote location and lack of an emergency medical system.

That night, we were greeted with amazing Costa Rican cuisine and went to bed at a hotel near the airport. When morning dawned, we rented a car and headed west towards the coastal town of Jaco, then south, towards a small town just north of the Osa Peninsula, called Uvita. Over the next three weeks, we hung out at local surf spots, hostels, restaurants and hangouts. We spoke with locals, as well as ex-patriots, and our conversations kept coming back to my background in emergency medicine. Every time, the response was the same: there was definitely a need for someone with my skill set and I would be more than welcome if I ever wanted to relocate.

One particular day of my trip, as I sat drinking a kombucha, I heard hollering, and watched as a group of people carried a young woman into the hostel from the beach. She appeared to have a broken lower leg. As a medical provider, my first instinct was to jump up and render aid, but, as a tourist, I was curious. Instead, I sat back and watched. One person suggested calling an ambulance. Another mentioned having seen a first aid kit. The ambulance was called, but no one seemed to know how long it would take to arrive. As the patient screamed, the first-aid kit was produced: a milk carton full of rags. This all took place very quickly and, after just a few minutes, I introduced myself and looked for a creative way to splint the mangled leg and to find an alternative hippie medicine to calm my patient.

About an hour later I was told the ambulance had arrived. I expected a crew, but none came. I was informed we would have to carry the patient out ourselves. What I saw when I got out to the road was not what I had expected. It was a van, with lights and a siren and a driver. A driver with no medical training. I couldn’t imagine the fear my patient was experiencing - a long ride ahead with no real assistance. What about patients with more severe injuries? Could they survive such a trip, even if they could endure the lack of pain management?

I spent many nights during that time thinking about what I had seen and been told. Of course, it sounded fun to move down to an exotic locale and help people, doing what I love, but then I remembered the old proverb, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ With West Coast Rescue, our goal isn’t to offer emergency medical help for just a day, or a week, or even a year, but to teach people how to care for their own through medical courses and technical rescue training.

During the rainy season in Costa Rica, vehicles often go off the road and patients can be difficult to access due to steep terrain, weather and a lack of time, equipment and training. Training locals to be efficient in technical rescue would create jobs and more security within the community. However, many of the local Ticos speak only broken English, despite a large population of English-speaking ex-pats from North America and Europe. We hope to offer ESL classes to help the locals better communicate with their potential patients.

Local officials and citizens of these communities know what their key medical and technical rescue needs are. It’s our job at West Coast Rescue to assist them in developing a plan to address those needs for the long-term and help them obtain necessary training. Donations to our Costa Rica project fund training and equipment to help save lives in these rural communities.