Serving At The Crossroads

Corporate History

The Genesis of our mission...

A number of years ago a Presbyterian Church in Liberty Corner, NJ launched an overseas mission, building a small church and starting a school in La Entrada de Copan, Honduras for impoverished families. These families could not afford the cost of a uniform and textbooks, which were prerequisites for their children’s attendance at government-supported public schools. Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Chester, PA joined in the mission trips and participated in what was called the Hearts for Honduras program to support church based educational missions.

Some of the people on those early missions had medical and dental backgrounds and made contact with local physicians and dentists in the area only to find out that although there were private practices, the majority of people in the community, most of whom were caught up in a cycle of poverty, could only avail themselves of services provided by local public clinics. Visits to these clinics revealed a lack of basic medicines, clinical equipment and an organizational structure to support the needs of those seeking medical attention. Given that the majority of people in the Copan area of Honduras have no means of private transportation other than on foot or by horseback, even the nearest hospital, approximately 40 miles away, is virtually inaccessible to most people living in La Entrada.

The leadership of Westminster’s early mission trips saw starving children dying in hospitals, families having to make the choice between eating or attending to the needs of a sick child, happy smiling people, but mouths filled with decaying or missing teeth because they had no toothbrush or toothpaste; irrespective of whether a person had a physician’s prescription that need to be filled or they were simply trying to obtain over-the-counter pain relievers, antiseptics or vitamins, the medications generally were not available at the pharmacies. And if they had been, these people did not have the means to pay for them anyway.

Westminster’s leadership felt there had to be another way to attend to the needs of these people. Doing nothing was not an option. It would be inhuman to walk away from the situation that we encountered only to leave these people trapped, through no fault of their own, in a cycle of poor health and poverty from which they had no means of escape.

Recognizing that we had access to medications in the US, we began consultations with people at home. We reflected on our own abundance, good fortune and wealth of contacts that might be in a position to help us and we began developing plans within a small discussion group to provide medications, medical and dental expertise to this community in the mountains of Honduras. One leader in our midst dared to dream even bigger dreams and suggested that collectively we knew enough people in West Chester, PA who could probably help us build a new clinic in La Entrada that would serve more than a few people in the community. Knowing that the US dollar goes a long way in that part of the world, we shared in his vision of relieving pain and suffering and we believed that we would find the people to help us sustain this clinic for a long period of time. Hence the idea of Serving At The Crossroads (SATC) was born and a formal charitable organization, created as a 501 (c) (3) corporation, was formed in 2004 to allow us to receive tax deductible funding from private individuals and corporate donors in support of the health needs of impoverished families in La Entrada.