Why I Keep Going Back

I went to Honduras for the first time in 2006 on a church mission trip. I was not looking for a life's work. I was not expecting to fall in love with a place. I was not planning to still be going back twenty years later.

I went to Honduras for the first time in 2006 on a church mission trip. I was not looking for a life's work. I was not expecting to fall in love with a place. I was not planning to still be going back twenty years later.

But here I am, days away from boarding another plane to Catacamas, and I find myself trying to answer the question people ask me more than any other:

Why do you keep going back?

The honest answer is that I can't unsee what I've seen.

In 2006, the hospital that now stands in Catacamas, Olancho did not exist. It was not even yet an idea. I was spending time in neighboring towns, Juticalpa and Manto, working alongside local church leaders as part of a partnership I would soon begin to lead. One of those leaders was a man named Alberto.

Alberto was, and still is, the kind of person who sees what isn't there yet and believes in it anyway. He was a key figure in the church community, a thoughtful leader, a man with a long view of what his region needed. We worked together on nutritional programs and scholarships. We built something across a language barrier and a cultural divide, and it held.

One day, Alberto took me to a piece of land. There was nothing there. Dirt, maybe some scrub. He told me that a hospital would be built on that spot.

I stood on an empty lot in Olancho and tried to imagine what he was describing. I believed him, not because I could see it, but because I knew him.

Over the years that followed, I watched it happen. Concrete was poured. Walls went up. A hospital took shape in one of the most remote and underserved regions of Honduras, a place where the nearest alternative was hours away, where families had long made impossible choices between travel they couldn't afford and care they couldn't access.

When I could, I visited. I watched the place grow. I celebrated what it represented: a community that had built something for itself, with help from partners who believed in it.

For years, that was the story. I kept going back, trip after trip, twelve visits over nearly two decades. I watched the place grow, brought others with me, and stayed connected to the community I had come to love. It felt like progress. It felt like enough.

Then I went back in 2024. It was my thirteenth trip.

What I found was a hospital in crisis. Not visibly, not dramatically. Hospitals in places like Catacamas have learned to keep functioning long past the point where the rest of us would have stopped. The staff still showed up. The patients still came. But underneath the surface, things were failing. Equipment was breaking down. The neonatal unit, the ward where the most fragile newborns in the region fight for their lives, was running on incubators that were held together by improvised repairs and sheer necessity.

Several were already out of service. The ones still running were not far behind.

I had watched this hospital be built from nothing. I was not willing to watch it quietly fall apart.

In early 2025, I founded Healing Hearts Honduras.

I want to be honest about something: starting a nonprofit is not glamorous. It is paperwork and patience and asking people for money and sending emails into the void and wondering, more than once, whether you have any idea what you're doing.

But then I think about Alberto standing on that empty lot, telling me what he could see that I couldn't yet.

And I think about the nurse in the neonatal unit who shows up every day to care for babies in incubators that may or may not work tomorrow.

And I think about the fact that $18,000, an amount that is genuinely achievable for a community of people who care, is the difference between a functioning neonatal unit and one that is failing.

That is why I keep going back. Because I have seen it, and I cannot unsee it, and it turns out that is enough to keep moving.

I leave for Honduras on May 22nd. Two days at the hospital in Catacamas. I will walk into the neonatal unit and look the staff in the eye, and I want to be able to tell them that people in the United States are paying attention.

If you have been thinking about getting involved, whether with a donation, a share, or simply a conversation, there is no better moment than right now.

You can learn more and donate at the button below.

Thank you for reading. And thank you, always, to the people of Catacamas for building something worth fighting for.

Kirstin Ivy

Founder, Healing Hearts Honduras