Eliecer Cruz Alvarez, right, a general surgeon with the Dominican national police, watches Dr. Sharon Weintraub, a Project HOPE volunteer and Dr. Ricardo Guimaraes, from the Brazilian navy, perform a hernia operation on a Dominican man aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission Continuing Promise 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, France, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana.