Just months after finishing midwifery training in Nottingham, England, Ruth Gibbons volunteered with the Catholic Institute of International Relations as a nurse and midwife for two years in Central America. After a crash course in Spanish, she left Mexico City on a bus to Honduras. This is the story of her work in hospitals in Santa Rosa de Copan and Juticalpa from 1970 to 1971.

A remarkable human testament of the day-to-day joys and struggles—caught up within the tragic balance of lives lost and lives saved—sits alongside a growing questioning of the role of international volunteers within such a system of dispossession, poverty and injustice.