Edgar Arriaga Fund (Roland's Homeless Brother)

I am Roland Arriaga. I live in New Orleans and I am creating a fund to help my homeless brother Edgar Arriaga who is lives in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. I am so distraught in dealing with the corruption and ineptitude of the system in Honduras to the point that they cannot provide quality health care to its own people.

My brother is in a public hospital, Catarino Rivas Hospital in San Pedro Sula, where poor and homeless people go for supposedly decent medical care. I am down here doing what I can to help save him. He has kidney damage, is on dialysis, and an inflamed prostate and suffers from dementia. Nevertheless he recognizes me at times. He has been in the hospital for 26 days. The hospital is short of supplies - not even bed spreads and blankets they have . Not even medication or medical supplies. I have to make runs every day to the pharmacies to get his prescriptions filled. Some pharmacies are ill-equipped and do not have the supplies. So I have to run around the city looking for one that has the medication. I even had to buy him bed sheets because the darn hospital did have any. Not even pillows! Not even water! I have to bribe the nurses and staff to make this work! Un-freaking-believable! Honduras, the country that I left 53 years ago to study abroad.

The hospital sent my brother to the COVID unit to catch it so he would die because down here they send sick homeless patients to the COVID unit so they can die and make room for incoming patients. They sent Edgar to the COVID unit and he doesn't catch it so they send him back up to Nephrology when I arrived. He never had COVID a reliable source told me. It's inhumane!

Yesterday the hospital wanted to throw him out. And I begged the administrator not to do it because I have a nursing home set up for him and I explained to her that all I needed was to hire the nurses and to give me a few more days. The nursing home doesn't have nurses so I am scrambling to find private man nurses to assist him and continually bribing people to do their job. The hospital does not want to take responsibility for his care anymore because they told me that the hospital is short of beds and they those beds for incoming patients. The social worker and hospital administration here is so inept and corrupted that it infuriates me to the bone. I'm giving out gifts $$$ to make people do what they are suppose to do and yet they still underperform. It's frustrating.

My brother Edgar has been homeless for a number of years. The family did not know his whereabouts for since COVID. Sources say that they found him curled up on sidewalk dying with a severe kidney malfunction. The hospital labeled him as a social outcast until a friend of my cousin called my sister saying that he was dying. The hospital staff found her phone number in his wallet. That's how we found out. I've been here for 5 days and returning tomorrow but I feel this is not enough time for to get things done and to at least place my brother in a nursing facility and under proper care and assistance.

My goal is to raise enough funds in the next few days to get him out of that despicable place and move him to a more suitable facility. So any type of help will do - money, connections (if you know someone down here who can help with ideas and referrals), prayers - anything. I am managing this and will make sure that this effort and aid goes to save my brother's life so that he can get the better care that he needs while I'm down here.

Thank you so much friends and family!!!!

Thank you God for lighting the way!

Roland