LIHU‘E — When Terry Walsh met her husband, Mark Walsh, seven years ago, he told her that he had a bucket list of things he’d like to do before he dies. “I always had a bucket list in my mind,
LIHU‘E — When Terry Walsh met her husband, Mark Walsh, seven years ago, he told her that he had a bucket list of things he’d like to do before he dies.
“I always had a bucket list in my mind, but I never wrote it down,” Terry said.
But when she put it together, she wrote that one of the things she’d like to do — besides skydiving, hot-air ballooning and traveling overseas — is volunteer on an international medical mission to help the poor.
The concept of a medical mission made sense. Terry Walsh is a pharmacist for Wilcox Memorial Hospital in Lihu‘e, while Mark Walsh has been pursuing a career in nursing.
So three years ago, they joined IMAHelps on a medical mission to Somoto, Nicaragua. The Rancho Mirage, Calif.-based organization has been putting together humanitarian medical missions to some of the poorest regions of Central and South America and Asia since 2000. What the Mark and Terry Walsh didn’t expect is that they’d get hooked on humanitarian work and want to do it every year.
The Walshes joined IMAHelps again in Esteli, Nicaragua, last summer and just got back from a 10-day medical mission to Jinotega, Nicaragua, in the heart of Central America’s coffee plantation region. Next summer, the Lihu‘e couple plans to join IMAHelps on a medical mission to Cuzco, Peru, at the 11,000-foot level in the Andes Mountains.
“I thought I would do a medical mission once, cross it off my list and go on to the next thing,” Terry said. “But we now plan to do this every year.”
Indeed, for Mark, the joy is not only in helping the poor, but in working with nearly 100 other IMAHelps volunteers from Hawai‘i and across the United States, who are equally committed to helping the poorest of the world’s poor.
“Working side by side with them is a fantastic experience,” said Mark, who has helped spread the word about IMAHelps to other medical professionals on Kaua‘i, several of whom joined the Walshes on this year’s medical mission to Jinotega.
The Kaua‘i crew included Dr. Emilia Williams, a surgical oncologist at Kaua‘i Veterans Memorial Hospital in Waimea; Dr. Brigitte Carreau, a pediatrician at Wilcox Memorial Hospital; and Caryn Seaman, who also works at Wilcox as an operating-room nurse.
Williams, a part-time Kaua‘i resident who also teaches at Texas A&M University Medical School in Temple, said she performed mostly gallbladder, thyroid and hernia surgeries.
“We saw some interesting cases with thyroid goiter,” Williams said. “We don’t see much of that in the U.S. because we don’t have iodine deficiencies here.”
Williams has also volunteered on a medical mission to Haiti after a devastating series of earthquakes struck the island in 2010.
Carreau, who previously volunteered on medical missions in Katmandu, Nepal; La Paz, Bolivia; and the island of Yap in Micronesia, said she was struck by the poverty in Nicaragua’s coffee growing region.
“We saw one 4-year-old girl who looked like a one-year-old due to malnutrition,” she said, adding that many patients do not have access to pre-natal or pediatric care.
“They don’t see doctors on a regular basis,” said Carreau, adding that the work of the volunteers provided critical support to indigent population. During their 10-day medical mission, IMAHelps volunteers treated more than 7,000 patients from Jinotega and its surrounding communities in remote areas of Nicaragua, near the Honduran border.
One of their patients was Jose Jesus Rodriguez, an 18-year-old coffee-plantation worker who was born with an extra thumb on each hand, which IMAHelps surgeons removed.
In addition to being unsightly, Rodriguez said he could not move his extra thumbs and that they made it difficult for him to grasp various tools. He said the surgery would improve his job security by helping to ensure that he could grasp tools and other farm implements like his fellow coffee plantation employees.
Other patients included 64-year-old Catalino Vallecito Torres, a coffee-plantation worker who was electrocuted when he fell on a power line while trimming a tree. His right leg was amputated just below his knee as a result of the electrocution, but the cut wasn’t made properly, so IMAHelps surgeons recut his leg and wrapped it so that it would heal properly.
The Walshes said they learned of IMAHelps from Prudence Del Toro, a surgical technologist and former Hawai‘i resident who previously volunteered with the group on medical missions in Ecuador.
Del Toro joined the Walshes in Somoto two years ago, She wasn’t able to join the group the past two years, but hopes to rendezvous with her Kaua‘i friends next summer in Peru.
Visit www.imahelps.org for more information or to make a direct donation to the group, which is solely comprised of volunteers with no paid staff.
• Jeff Crider is a freelance writer based in Palm Desert, Calif., who has volunteered in five humanitarian medical missions looks forward to many more. He currently sits in the IMAHelps Board of Directors.
