Medical Mission ¨Hogar de San Francisco¨

Mark, Kevin & Felipe posted a blog last night which discusses the joy of the students at Fe y Alegria. They mention the medical mission which we visited on Monday where children in desperate circumstances still manifest great joy.
The mission is called ¨Hogar de San Francisco de Asis¨and it is truly a home. Dr Tony, a second order Franciscan established the home in the early 1990s after working for a few years for a medical mission a few kilometers away from its present location, Chaclacayo, outside of Lima. Before coming to Peru he had been a pediatric doctor with a tenured position in, I believe, a university in Georgia. He left it all to work with the poor and his focus was naturally children. The first few years his work with the other medical mission led him to understand the need for a separate facility just for children, and that is what the Hogar is.
There is a capacity for about 45 children in the home but there are often 50 and Dr Tony has hosted up to 65 at a time. The children are not necessarily abandoned by their families but the parents are indigent and/or unable to provide the level of care needed by the children. The idea is to give them a safe, happy home to live while their medical needs are addressed. When they are cured or nothing else can be done for them, they return home. Home can be anywhere in Peru, but most come from the high sierra (the Andes), or the jungle (Amazon basin), where access to medical care is difficult.
A variety of medical needs are addressed by Dr Toy and his staff. Many children have suffered severe burns, often do to thing unheard of in the US: Mothers cooking in one or two room huts drop vats of boiling oil, some fall into vats of boiling water that are left on the floor temporarily because the ¨stove¨has only one burner, and there was one boy who was burned when the hut he was living in was burned to the ground with him, his sister and his mother in it, probably because someone wanted the land on which they had squatted. There are a number of infants who have medical issues easily addressed in the US like cleft palettes. We saw some of the parents of these young people visiting in the livingroom. Another major category of medical problems are orthpaedic in nature, again, usually addressed early on and with ease in the US. There are also cases of leukemia, cancer, and incurable disease such as MD. Dr Tony told us many other stories including the case of a young girl of 13 whose severe headaches were ignored for too long. By the time she made it to Lima her brain tumor had spread so much that it was impossible to remove all of it in the Lima hospital where she was taken. The doctors gave her three months to live but she lived another year and a half as a joyful presence in the Hogar. Only in the last stages was she able to return home receiving paliative care, and dying with her family at her side. Such cases would be more readily addressed in other parts of the world. Even leukemia, which now has an 80% survival rate in the developed world, only has a 40% survival rate here due to the lack of ealr intervention and resources.
In a way much like the children of Fe y Alegria, these residents were characterized by joy. Dr Tony has a real home there in which the children share large dormitories for boys, girls, adoescents, and infants. Everyone has a chore, they all go to school or work with a teacher at the hogar, they all take cre of each other. It is truly touching.
By chance, there was a group of wonderful, mature group of young women from St John the Baptist of Long Island there for the week. They showed our guys the ropes and we quickly warmed up to playing with the student. One, Jhon (the spelling here is accurate due to the fact that many Peruvians want American sounding names so they need to adjust the spelling) took an instant liking to using my knees as a launching pad. Jhon was there for hearing as well as orthopaedic defects. His Spanish was difficult to understand at first, but after a few rounds of reviewing his times tables, my ear adjusted to his speech impediment. He jumped into many a lap, ran around, fought over the table hockey game, and generally was like any other kid.
At lunch I sat with a group of adolescents who were happy to give me there opinions about the World Cup- good timing on that for I don´t know what topics I would have had in common with them otherwise! Of the five, three were from the jungle, all burn victims, and two were from the sierra. One young man was a mature 27 years old, the oldest resident by far. He was making progress in his orthpaedic issues as well as his education. He has been in the hogar for over seven years. It was this group that challenged our guys to a futbol ( soccer) game. A wonder given their physical disabilities, but a joy to watch.