The Cinterandes Foundation is a non-profit organization whose goal is to promote human development. We understand human development as the liberation of human potential, leading to mankind progress, well being and improvement of quality of life of the individual and the community, with liberty,in harmony with the environment. To reach this goal, it is necessary to carry out programs to enhance human capabilities and satisfy basic human needs. We believe these programs should cover: health, education, food production and nutrition, housing, work and productivity, communication and recreation.

Note: We place health in the center, not only because of its importance to assure quality of life, but because the people who started the plan are physicians and health care is the center of our activities.

We started with a surgical program called MOBILE SURGERY: an operating room was built on a van, and after eleven years of work, more than 5,000 surgical operations have been performed in the country side and suburbs of the cities, with excellent results, a very low complication rate and first of all, in the patients own environment, in a much more humane way.

Soon we realized that surgery, in spite of its great accomplishments, has only a small impact in the overall health of a country. Nevertheless, its fast, objective and sometimes spectacular results make it, an excellent mean to gain credibility, confidence and acceptance from a community. People from rural areas, who are usually very distrustful after not fulfilled promises from politicians, change their attitude rapidly in view of surgical results, making it easier to organize other health-impacting programs, such as, nutrition, immunization, child and maternal health, etc. For this reason, we decided to organize programs in “integral family health” following our surgical activities.

Our experience has brought us to a second conclusion: Health programs can not be successful, if they are carried out independently without coordination with other development programs. We believe that a plan in human development has to be an integrated approach to improve the quality of life in all and every aspect. Finally, If we want this plan to be sustainable, it has to preserve nature and the environment and should be elaborated with community participation, respecting civil liberties.