After 105 Days of Lockdown Honduran Government’s SINAGER ‘Creates’ Roatan’s First COVID-19 Death

On June 30 Honduran Secretary of Health report stated that Gisell Leal, a 19-year-old Roatan woman died from COVID-19.  The truth is far from what the Honduran government and the mainland media reported about Roatan.

Pedro Duarte, Leal’s father, said that his daughter had contracted an acute infection of Helicobacter Pylori bacteria and was brought to the Roatan hospital to seek help. According to Duarte the Roatan hospital staff refused to treat Leal unless she submitted to a COVID-19 test.

If anyone died of COVID-19 on Roatan depends on who you ask.

“The results were negative,” said Duarte. “She died of a heart attack because the sugar has shot-up and her pressure went down at the same time. (….) What SINAGER says is purely false.”

Keeping track of who is sick and who dies of what on Roatan where many people know each other is relatively simple. The numbers of mainland Honduras “deaths-by-COVID” reported by SINAGER, now at 542, are much harder to challenge.

While the controlled media in US and Europe has shifted focus to demonstrations and lootings, Honduras is a few steps behind in this agenda. “There are powers interested in creating panic among the world’s population with the sole aim of permanently imposing unacceptable forms of restriction on freedoms. (…) A disturbing prelude to the realization of a world government beyond all control,” wrote Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in his May 7 appeal.

Since the island has been locked down on March 16 Honduran government’s SINAGER has cast Roatan into a spiral of fear, economic misery, and soaring crime.The Honduran government has done nothing to protect the most vulnerable of dying from COVID-19: the old and those with compromised immune system.

Mrs. Daya holds the tools of her midwife’s a pincer, two paits of scissors, from a toll box donated by UNICEF.

A Roatanian who helped deliver 147 babies

Before Roatan Hospital opened its doors, every baby on the island was born with the aide of a midwife, usually at home. Prior to 1989 a hardy core of caring, knowledgeable midwives helped to bring many generations of Roatanians into this world. In French Harbour there was Elle Hydes, in Oak Ridge there was Truby Puchie. Coxen Hole had Bernadina Palmer, Grace Pryce, Estella Dilbert and Lizzy Lindo.

Genevra ‘Daya’ Brooks, 93, is one such special person. She was born on June 23, 1924 in Flowers Bay on an island that was completely different  than today. “We slaughtered a cow on Friday and we ate it on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. People would take their sacks of copra and a few coconuts and paddled to the ship to trade for beans and rice,” Mrs. Daya remembers.

Mrs. Genevra has never met her father Peter Brooks who moved to Tela before she was born. She and her four older brothers were brought up by her mother Virginia Allen who was also a local midwife. “We were raised by God’s help, hard labor and help of family,” says Mrs. Daya who completed six grades at the local Juan Brooks school.

I delivered some by the foot. We say that ‘they stepped out of their mother’s womb

At 25, Mrs. Daya married and moved out of her mother’s house. She supported her family by cooking, baking and raised five children: “I was like a spider. When a spider is born it begins to work.”

Mrs. Daya also took care of several ailing family members. For 30 years she assisted a disabled brother, and for 31 years she took care of her son who was paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair. When Daya’s mother began losing her sight, Mrs. Daya took her in and for 25 years tended to her every need until her mother Virginia passed at 102 years old. “I have no regrets, I am happy,” Mrs. Daya says.

It was her mother who taught her daughter how to deliver babies. Mrs. Daya delivered her first baby when she was in her late 30-ies. Her very first baby was Dr. Jackie Woods, a local girl who became a doctor. All-in-all Mrs. Daya has delivered 147 babies.

After each birth Mrs. Daya would massage the mother’s belly and push the stretched skin upward and then tightly wrap the stomach with “brown cotton.” This procedure would help in quickly tightening the skin. “You skin stretches. It takes nine months for baby to come out and it takes nine months for the skin to go in. That is the secret of the belly,” Mrs. Daya says.

Her wisdom comes not form medical books but from experience. “The best time to have a baby is in the first quarter of the moon. Everything is loose then. On the full moon everything is tight: hips, skin. We relate to the moon cycles,” Mrs. Daya explains.

Mrs. Daya would charge 45 Lempiras for delivering a baby and with the earnings she built a beautiful wooden house just across the street from the Church of God school in Coxen Hole. Today that house is full of visiting friends, neighbors, family and an occasional grateful child she helped into this world. “Jesus had no doctor. He was born in the manger ” says Mrs. Daya. “I am proud to be 93 years old and be able to take care of myself; proud of delivering all these babies.”

Even though she retired, in her late seventies Mrs. Daya delivered her last baby. “’Ms. Daya you stopped working, but for God’s sake help us out,’” she recalls a neighbor at her door asking for help. Ms. Daya rushed to the house and cut the umbilical cord. “I could still deliver babies today, if I had to,” she says opening her aluminum toolbox that contained all her tools needed in deliveries.