A Greene doctor and an Auburn Sunday school class help families in Nicaragua.
A simple gesture. An individual’s passion. These seeds can grow into far-reaching projects of goodwill once word gets out.
A doctor from Greene and an Auburn Sunday school class discovered through a third-party conversation that they were both doing what they could to help ordinary families in Nicaragua.
With two unrelated missions, Dr. Thomas Byrne and Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church connected in a joint effort and possibly a future project to bring medical care to people in Puerto Cabezas, a remote coastal region of the Central American country.
In addition, students from Leavitt Area High School in Turner showed their generosity and made Byrne’s most recent trip a little more special.
Each year the Sunday school students at Grace Lutheran study a country or world region and engage in a missions project, said Katy Sperl of Minot, who teams up with her mother, Donna Berry, to lead the children. This fall, the focus was on Nicaragua.
In a passing comment earlier this year, Sperl mentioned the studies to her own doctor, Diane MacKinnon, who just happened to be married to a doctor about to travel to Nicaragua for the second time.
Byrne said he was so gratified, appreciative, excited and rejuvenated after his first trip to Puerto Cabezas with his colleague, Greg Holzman, that he had to return. Byrne teaches medical residents at Central Maine Medical Center and specializes in cervical cancer.
“I think doctors here can learn so much by providing care and treatment, and the doctors there can learn from us and become more advanced and self-sufficient,” Byrne said. “I really think this is why I got into medicine.”
Medicine and comfort
Byrne, who ventured to Central America on his own time and at his own expense, provides much-needed gynecological care to women with a high rate of cervical cancer.
“Once word got out that we were there, women came from miles to be screened,” said Byrne. “It’s because nearly everyone knows someone who has died from cervical cancer.”
Byrne noted that one woman came to the hospital with one of her ovaries in a jar. The woman recently had undergone surgery because of a cyst and came to find out if cancerous tissues were present.
“I was just amazed at the responsibility and the extreme measures that these women would go to receive medical care,” Byrne said. “We just take so much for granted here.”
Before leaving in November, he agreed to take with him cards and Band-Aid packages from the Auburn Sunday school children.
His daughter, Elizabeth, as an officer of Leavitt High’s National Honor Society, proposed sending stuffed animals to the children in Nicaragua.
“Obviously, I couldn’t help with the medical care, but I thought I could do something nice for the kids,” Elizabeth said.
She thought she could gather about 200 stuffed animals for a Puerto Cabeza orphanage. Instead, more than 700 soft and fluffy comfort items flooded in.
“When the kids at the orphanage saw them, they all came screaming and they were so happy,” said Elizabeth, who accompanied her parents on the November trip.
The doctor brought home many pictures from the orphanage and hospital to show the Lutheran Sunday children where their packages had gone and to bring to life their geographic and cultural studies.
The children have incorporated Spanish carols and Christmas traditions into their Christmas program, scheduled for this Sunday.
Byrne plans another trip to Nicaragua in March to take more doctors, more resources and more goodwill.
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