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A young lady is quietly awoken from a short afternoon nap. For a brief moment, she thinks she is back home in her village in Nicaragua. As her senses slowly become stronger, she realizes that she is far from home. The last week has been a whirlwind of change, fear, doubt and joy. She begins to remember the last few days. What began as a simple checkup for her pregnant sister at their village clinic, turned into the most intense day of her young life. The doctor found that her sister was showing signs of premature birth, and the baby was in a breech position. She needed an emergency C-section, and she needed it fast!

The next few hours were a blur, full of nurses and doctors preparing her sister for an emergency air evacuation with the Wings of Hope airplane. She remembers seeing the plane come in for landing as the car ambulance rushed to the airport. She smiles briefly as she thinks back to her first encounter with the pilot. He was trying to reassure her and her almost unconscious sister. His funny sounding, but steady, Spanish comforted her as she climbed into an aircraft for the first time in her life. The flight was uneventful, as her worry for her sister distracted her from the wonder of flight. A few hours later at the Puerto Cabezas hospital, her sister safely gave birth to her nephew.

But, now, as she hears her sister quietly crying beside her with her baby nestled close, the joy and relief of seeing her baby nephew born healthy, and her sister recover completely, seem a lifetime away. Her eyes slowly scan her surroundings. They are sharing a bed in a maternity house in Puerto Cabezas. The house was made for people like them: released by the hospital, but nowhere to go in a strange town with no family. In a region of a country that doesn’t have paved roads outside of a few towns, traveling is no small task. The trip home is typically 7-8 hours on a bumpy, muddy road in a hot and dusty old school bus — less than ideal conditions for a newborn baby. Making matters worse, the torrential rains have made the road home impassable. Although it wouldn’t matter anyway, as they do not have any money for the bus tickets. She feels so powerless and alone.

She sees the pilot approaching their bed from a distance. In a house full of pregnant women, it’s pretty hard for him to hide. He has come by every day to check on them and give them money for food and medicine. This time, however, he comes carrying the greatest news. He had a call for another emergency to their hometown. The call came late in the afternoon, so he wasn’t able to make the flight right away. The patient is fairly stable, so he will be flying out early the next morning. He offers to take her, her sister and her nephew home the next morning on his way to pick up the patient. No bumpy, hot, dusty, day-long bus trip. No more sharing a house with 40 other pregnant women. After the most trying five days of her life, she will be going home.

The next morning, all the memories come rushing back as she sees the Wings of Hope airplane for the second time. She asks her sister if she remembers anything about the flight just a few days before. With tears in her eyes, her sister responds, “No. The only thing I remember is thinking I was dying.” As they climb into the waiting aircraft, she embraces her sister and gives a quick kiss to her new nephew. Halfway through the calm, early morning flight, the quiet hum of the aircraft’s engine begins to lull her to sleep. She smiles as she realizes that, this time, when she awakes she will again have that familiar feeling of being back home — except, this time, she will really be there.

Cost of Hope

The bike that saved the day

Hopelessness is a disease, one that completely robs the body and soul of all joy and self-worth.  It slowly creeps into your heart and starts to grow like a cancerous tumor. It makes smart people foolish, turns the active lazy, and the aspiring complacent. Hopeless people aimlessly go through life, feeling helpless and powerless to deal with whatever life throws at them. It manifests itself in many people, on different spectrums of life. However, it is always amplified during times of stress and need.

For one teenage girl from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, hopelessness took hold on her way home from a trip to the hospital. She had just been diagnosed with Chikungunya, a virus that spreads through mosquito bites. Although there is no cure, medication can ease the severe fever and pain that the person endures. Her family is from a far out community and sent her to Puerto Cabezas to go to school. She lives in a one-room wooden house with her two cousins. None of them have any money to buy the medicines that help control the extreme symptoms. The nurse tells the girl that she will just have to endure the high fever and joint pains for the next five days, until her body gets rid of the virus.

She collapses on her front porch, totally exhausted from the five-minute walk from the clinic to her house. With the next five days weighing heavily on her mind, she hears her cousin talking to their neighbor. She knows that he works for Wings of Hope, flying patients from remote communities to Puerto Cabezas. A small hint of hope begins to build within her, as she hears her neighbor's motorcycle head down the street toward the pharmacy. This inkling of hope transforms into a reality as the neighbor returns with the medicine. The next few days are full of healing as her body, with the help of the medicine, fights the virus. On her way to school on day four, she excitedly tells her neighbor that she has fully recovered and is so happy to return to school.

For the neighbor, the cost of hope was only a trip to the pharmacy and two dollars worth of medicine. But for the young girl it meant everything – four days of her life being properly cared for with less suffering.

Hope is what fuels change and development. It is essential for dreams to become reality. If you don't have a desire or an expectation to do great things, those things will never be accomplished. Sometimes, the cost of hope is more than a $2 pharmacy bill. Other times, it costs nothing more than a helping hand or an understanding spirit. But with the promise of what can be accomplished by people with hope, it is an investment that the world needs to make.

A Trip to the Hospital

After I wrote this blog, I returned to the hospital. Much to my delight, the baby who was grasping for life in the ICU is on the way to a healthy recovery.

The first time you step into the hospital in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, it can be quite a shock –especially if you have spent any time in a modern hospital in the modern world. But when you make three to four visits a week, you start to overlook the slightly decaying concrete walls, dirty floors, stray dogs running freely, and the many people with various diseases waiting for care. What you see, instead, is the best staffed, supplied and equipped hospital on this side of the country. The ICU may only have four beds, but the hospital has an ICU. It also has a neonatal ICU, which is where a lot of my patients end up.

“So piloto, who are you here to see today?” asks the nurse on duty. She says it with a smirk, because usually I forget the paperwork and have to explain who my patient is in my broken Spanish. Today, I actually have two patients; the first is a young pregnant girl, who was in premature birth when I flew her the day before. When my Spanish finally finds the right room, I immediately recognize her through the small door window. She doesn't see me, as I witness her and her husband holding their first child for the first time. Suddenly, she recognizes me – her face glowing with relief and pure joy – and gestures for me to come in. For a moment, I get to share in the happiness of this young family. As I scan the room, I don't have to look far to see my other patient. She's in the bed next to us.

She is a 14-year-old girl I flew in late the day before. She had an emergency C-section with serious complications in the bush hospital. I flew her, the newborn baby and a doctor from the small town of Bonanza; there was no room for a family member to take the trip with her. I was nervous for her, because she was very scared and in a lot of pain. My heart went out to her, because she had to undergo such a traumatic experience alone. I make my way to her bed, after talking with the nurse. She says that the mother is stable, but heavily medicated. The baby, on the other hand, is struggling to hold on in the neonatal ICU. The mother’s eyes open, and she nervously nods when I ask if she remembers me. I try to offer words of encouragement and hope, but it’s hard to come up with words to say when your patient is a young mother whose child is dying next door. I do manage a smile out of her when I say that I'll come back tomorrow.

I make my way out of the hospital with my two patients, who are going through two totally different experiences, on my mind. As I pass the emergency room, I hear my name being called out over the noise of the crowd. It is the sister of another patient I flew a few weeks before. She is also pregnant and had been staying at a local maternity house until she was ready to give birth. The doctors had advised her to have the baby at the hospital, due to some anticipated complications. I spoke to her a few days ago, and she conveyed that she was extremely nervous and scared for the upcoming birth.

I step into to the examination room, where the expectant mother is sitting in a chair. I greet her, while silently wondering what my next conversation with her will be like. It is quite possible that the birth will go great, and I will again get to rejoice with another growing family. It is just as possible that I will again have to search for words of comfort and hope. But one thing is certain: Whatever is in store for this young lady, she will not experience it alone. Some patients need comfort, some need to share their joy, but all need someone there.

Something to Smile About ...

As she is leaning over one of our patients for that day, the dentist remarks to me, “Nobody likes to go the dentist.” I nod in agreement, as I look up from sterilizing the already used equipment. My gaze ends up at the slowly dwindling line of waiting patients. It's true: nobody looks like they’re enjoying themselves. A few teenage girls are nervously laughing and talking among themselves, but that will surely stop when they get closer to the front of the line. We are in a small village on the northeastern side of Nicaragua. A local dentist from the Pacific Coast and I are performing the first dental clinic that this village can remember.

We have decided to solely concentrate on extracting teeth that are causing pain. We figured that would lessen the workload some. I'm sure it did, but we are set to start on our 20^th patient, and a lot more are still waiting. We work two patients at a time to maximize the dentist’s time, since the anesthesia takes 5-10 minutes to take effect. While the dentist starts working on one patient, I call out for the next person in line. She is a little girl, maybe eight years old. She's wearing a slightly torn, but well cared for, dress. She approaches the chair timidly, but bravely. I ask for her name and gesture for her to sit down. She then says to me in a scared voice, ”I'm really afraid — and it (her tooth) really hurts.”

Immediately, my heart goes out to this brave young girl, who is making her first trip to the dentist alone. I try to reassure her by telling her the story of when I had to go to the dentist because I knocked a tooth out playing football. She laughs when I tell her it was because I ran into the field goal post. The anesthesia is now ready, and the dentist administers it. While the extraction is taking place, I hold her hand and try to distract her by pointing out things that are in her gaze. The tooth comes out fairly easily, and she gladly puts it in her pocket for a keepsake. As our numb, but happy, patient leaves for home, it dawns on me that we just experienced a great snapshot of humanitarian work. 

That snapshot is of a small dental clinic in a secluded village in one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Zoom in and you will see that the dentist is a Spanish girl who lives on the opposite coast of Nicaragua. She volunteered her time to help her fellow citizens. Zoom way, way out and you will discover that her plane ticket to the Atlantic Coast was purchased by a man from Louisiana — and some of the instruments she used were donated by an American man doing water projects around the region. At the edge of the frame and a little blurry, I see myself. And I realize that I would not be in this picture at all if not for the hundreds of Wings of Hope volunteers who sacrifice their time and money to make possible something so simple, yet so monumental, as pulling out a little girl’s tooth. As this picture takes shape in my head, my mind’s eye brings my role in all of this into focus. I do whatever is left — from flying the plane, to sterilizing the dentist’s tools, to holding the hand of a scared little girl.

Most of the people we help are just like that little girl. They are suffering, and they are afraid. They probably will never understand all the work and coordination it took to bring them relieving care. But, in reality, pulling out one little girl’s tooth takes hundreds of people around the world — most of whom will never cross paths with me or the dentist or the little girl — working together toward a common goal: to relieve the suffering of those born into extremely poor and difficult situations. 

It may take a village to raise a child, but my work has shown me that it can take a world to heal a toothache. And that is a picture that makes me smile.

A Realistic, Typical Day

Life as a Wings of Hope field director in Nicaragua can be very exciting and interesting at times. But with every life saved – or harrowing flight into unknown weather – there are days that are filled with redundancy, waiting, frustration … and more waiting.

It's 5 o'clock in the morning, and I am awakened by the sounds of my neighbor’s rooster. I crawl out of my mosquito net, silently praying that this is the day that the rooster becomes my neighbor’s dinner. With coffee in hand, I think that it would be nice to have something happen today that I could write about. I haven't had an emergency flight request for almost a week now, which is definitely a good thing. Because as an emergency medical relief pilot, when I'm not flying, people are healthy. I rarely like to sit around and wait for a call, so I decide to do some errands. I recently bought a vise clamp for my work bench at the airport. The first errand is to buy four bolts and nuts to mount it.

I get on my motorcycle and drive to the closest hardware store. Halfway there, I am met with a huge mound of sand and a bunch of workers. They tell me that the road is closed for repair. There aren't many roads around here, so I figure finding a detour shouldn't be too hard. After 45 minutes of driving through dirt paths and people’s backyards, I decide to stop and ask for directions. A man kindly gives me directions to an alternate road that I have never used before. After passing a taco stand run by an attractive girl, I decide that I like this detour and may use it more often. Although, it seems as if I held my gaze for a little too long. Our eyes met, and I nodded. I might as well have asked her to marry me.

The first hardware store doesn't have the bolts that I need, and the second can only manufacture them. I'm not sure how they would manufacture them, but I know that I don't want to wait for it to happen. With no bolts in hand, it's time for lunch. I pass by a local place and order the first thing on the menu: “aleta de tortuga.” I understand that “tortuga” means “turtle,” which is a popular choice for the people of Atlantic coast. I've never had turtle before, but I figure, “When in Rome...” What I did not know was that “aleta” means “fin or dorsal.” So out comes my lunch, an enormous turtle fin in a bowl of soup with a few potatoes in it. My brain may be saying, “When in Rome...,” but my digestive system is saying, “Why do you hate me?”

With the “aleta de tortuga” churning inside me, I remember seeing some random bolts in a storage shed near my house. The trip back takes me through the detour again. This time the taco stand girl has a friend with her. They notice me right away and wave. I wave back and wonder why I've never had this happen back in the states. In the storage shed, I find one bolt that will work. I then go to three more hardware stores and come up empty. I decide to go to the airport and get the proper dimensions that I need and have them manufactured. As I enter the airport, I mention my predicament to the security officer. He quickly tells me of his friend who sells bolts. Halfway through his explanation of where his friend lives, I stop paying attention because I stopped understanding him two sentences before that. I understood “near the baseball field”; that will get me close enough.

Of course, to get to the baseball field I have to pass the taco stand. I hope I can sneak by without being noticed, but that's not happening. She's wearing makeup now. I think, “Why did I nod?” I get to the baseball field, which is surrounded by random shops. Half of them are closed since it's coming up to the end of the day. I stop by a few of them that look like they would sell bolts. None of them do, but they point me to an alley and tell me that the second house on the right does. I enter the alley and find the second house on the right. Sure enough, there is a sign about the size of postcard that says “nuts and bolts.” I knock on the door and show the man what I need. He lets me in his house, and on the floor are about a hundred different kinds of bolts. He has the kind I need; the only catch is that he doesn't have nuts to fit them. I figure that's OK, I can spend all day tomorrow finding the nuts. Maybe I'll get some tacos, too.