The Mercy Connection: Hope Clinic International

By Kate Ernsting

How does a willingness to give care manage to call together those who have a stark need with the very people who can fill that need, even across countries, languages and cultures?

Sometimes the simplest of connections can be the bridge.

For Dr. Dan Heffernan, who founded Hope Clinic International (HCI) to serve the poorest of the poor in Nicaragua, the connection was his grandchildren’s pediatrician.

His son Dan was working for an American company in Nicaragua, and Dr. Jaime Rodriguez was their family pediatrician. The younger Heffernans learned from Rodriguez about the desperate needs for medical care among the children he serves in a rural area about 90 miles from Managua.

“You know, Dad, we’ve got to do something to help these people,” Heffernan Jr. told his father, who responded by flying to Nicaragua. After meeting the Nicaraguan doctor and seeing his work, Dr. Heffernan said he was determined to get him more help.

During that first trip, they visited a government hospital. “These types of hospitals are intended for the poor, and down there that means poor. The big thrill for them was getting a fan to give relief from the heat in the overcrowded, understaffed and under-tooled hospital.”

Dr. Heffernan was eager to make another trip and begin planning ways to expand the mission to Nicaragua. He was familiar with what it took as founder of a clinic serving the indigent in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The Michigan clinic started sending medical supplies to Nicaragua, but the biggest need in that country was still unmet.

“In some of the poorest areas, there is much intermarriage, causing many birth defects,” explained Heffernan. Dr. Rodriguez said what he needed most were surgeons….”

Expanding into another country required many more connections. More volunteer medical personnel were needed, particularly pediatricians and pediatric surgeons. Also needed were facilities, translators, and Nicaraguans who could help people coming from the U.S. to connect with the children and mothers needing special care.

Dr. Heffernan found Sherry Snyder, a nurse, to take on the task of planning the first medical mission trip in January, 2001. Pediatric surgeon Joseph Lelli, now of Detroit Children’s hospital, and Ann Arbor pediatrician Dave Thorrez led the effort. Hope Clinic International now sends three medical missions and one surgical mission a year.

Dr. Lelli was the key, helping children with a rare birth defect which has a very high incidence in Nicaragua. A rare inborn abnormality, called “imperforate annus,” is characterized by the absence of a rectal opening and can be corrected with surgery. In the rural mountains regions of Nicaragua, “poor children do not have access to a trained surgeon or a hospital,” Sherry Snyder explained.

Bringing in these surgeons can be life-changing. Snyder told the story of one of the first patients, a 7-year-old girl with an intestinal defect who wasn’t expected to live. “She was emaciated, lying down, very weak. Dr. Lelli did the surgery, which took 12 hours, at the nearest hospital in Managua. I saw her on a recent trip and she’s fine and living a normal life.”

Another patient is 2-year-old Sylvia, the granddaughter of one of the local volunteers.

“Her grandfather told us she would have to go to Costa Rica to have the operation, and there was no way he could possibly afford either the trip or the operation.” Snyder said that after the surgical mission team operated, she is happy, healthy, and “you couldn’t tell she ever had the condition.”

A month after his first mission trip, Ann Arbor pediatrician Dr. Roger Anderberg’s son Timothy, a recent college graduate, was killed by a car. In memory of their son, Roger and his wife Lorrie established a medical clinic in his name in the Nicaraguan town of Estelí. Tim’s clinic is staffed by a full-time physician.

Hope made a local connection with the St. Vincent de Paul Society which now helps organize the HCI missions. The Society helped them locate areas where they could do the most good, in the towns of Jinotega and Estelí and now all of the native Nicaraguans in the Society volunteer at the clinic and help with the missions, Snyder said.

For the medical missions, many other American pediatricians assist from the Ann Arbor-Detroit area, including Dr. Steve Park, who often finds volunteers among the residents he supervises at the University of Michigan.

Today a Nicaraguan surgeon is part of the mission. He has been trained in a laparoscopic surgery technique used by Dr. Lelli. The team brought a laparoscopic tower last year and left it for the doctor to use.

Through her sister, Snyder learned of a team of California firefighters who became volunteers too. “I knew they would be invaluable because they were all Emergency Medical Technicians. Each team of 14-18 people needs 5-6 translators. In California many EMTs speak fluent Spanish. So we filled two big needs with one connection!”

Charity may begin at home but when the need is huge and hearts are willing, it certainly doesn’t end there.

For more information, contact Sherry Snyder at SSnyder@hopeclinicinternational.org

Kate Ernsting writes from Ann Arbor through her company, Excelsis Communications