When David Weed, MD, Kelsey-Seybold Pediatrician, said he would be taking a “bit of a working vacation” this past November, he might have been guilty of a slight understatement.
Dr. Weed, Managing Physician of KSC’s Kingwood Clinic, and a team of 19 volunteer physicians, dentists and healthcare professionals examined and treated 900 indigent patients in three days during “that bit of a working vacation” in Nicaragua. Since 1991, Dr. Weed has dedicated two weeks annually to Health Talents International, a private, nonprofit organization that provides healthcare to indigent people in Central America.
“People live in pretty basic conditions down there,” the doctor explained. “There’s no running water or pit toilets, and people are lined up waiting to see us from before dawn until after sunset. I come back exhausted, but exhilarated. The rewards of the work are intangible, arising from the knowledge that you have contributed to meeting an enormous need.”
According to Dr. Weed, the cost of medical care in Central America is roughly equivalent to the cost in the United States. “But, the average income is something like 35 to 40 cents a day,” he says. “A visit to the doctor and prescription that may run $150 could cost a person more than he could earn in an entire year. Many indigent people down there simply don’t get care for common illnesses like heart disease and diabetes, ear infections and strep throat – or for complications caused by poverty, poor sanitation and parasites.”
The visiting Health Talents International teams may provide the only care these Central American citizens ever receive. “It’s a totally different healthcare environment,” Dr. Weed notes. “Sick people start arriving at 4 or 5 in the morning and wait all day in a long, seemingly endless line. They are very patient. If they don’t get seen the first day, they go home and come back the next day and wait again. It took me a while to adjust to that.”
Dr. Weed, who enrolled in Spanish classes and spent his lunch hours the year after his first Central American trip studying Spanish, says a Health Talents team usually consists of between 18 and 30 people – physicians, optometrists, dentists, nurses, chiropractors, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals.
“People who have no specific skills are also welcome – the rules are much less strict in Latin America, and there’s plenty of work for everyone,” Dr. Weed says. “My mother accompanied me several times and worked in the pharmacy, counting pills and labeling bottles. We need people to take temperatures and blood pressures and help manage the crowd – can you imagine what it’s like when more than 1,000 people converge on a 2,000-square-foot clinic?”
Dr. Weed insists that the rewards for his unpaid labor far outweigh the disadvantages and sacrifices. “The people are so grateful, so appreciative. I come home with my pockets full of the small, homemade gifts my patients urge on me to show their appreciation,” he says. “It’s wonderful when a child I’ve treated comes back the next year, gaining weight, doing well and thriving because of some small help I was able to give the parents.”
Every visit, the Kingwood pediatrician says, produces another “most rewarding case.” But, one he remembers with special fondness involved a little Nicaraguan girl who caught her leg in a bicycle chain, tearing her muscle down to the bone and destroying her ankle joint.
“Her parents were divorced, and the accident occurred on her father’s watch,” Dr. Weed recalls. “I suppose he was embarrassed to take her to the hospital, so he kept her for two weeks, then dropped her off at Mama’s front door. The mother brought her to us immediately. By this time, the wound was infected, and the child was in real trouble. But, we were able to get her admitted immediately to the local hospital for surgery that saved her foot. It’s scary to think what might have happened to her if we had not been there.”
