Angela before and after her operation

Healing in Honduras

When Dr. Peter Daly ’82 first met Angela in 2003, she was a nine year old with severely deformed legs. A “pequeño,” or “small one” at the Rancho Santa Fe in Honduras, she is one of the nearly 3,300 children currently adopted by Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos International (NPH), a Christian mission that provides a permanent family and home for orphaned children living in conditions of extreme poverty.

Rancho Santa Fe is one of nine NPH centers in Latin America and the Caribbean. While it has a small clinic that services the NPH youth and local residents, it did not have a facility for complex surgeries, like the ones that Angela required to correct her severe mutational skeletal condition—chondroectodermal dysplasia.

But Dr. Daly, then visiting from the United States as a general volunteer, was not going to leave Angela to the fate of a Honduran health care system that the World Health Organization called “disjointed and disorganized at best.” Rather, he arranged for her to have the six operations she needed in Minnesota, where she lived for a year with the Daly family in their home. Angela, now 15, is completely recovered. 

“Through God’s grace, Angela’s disability became the seed of inspiration for many to help improve not only her life, but the lives of her Honduran peers,” says Dr. Daly. Because of Angela, he and his wife, Lulu, a registered nurse, vowed to create a surgery center on the Rancho campus, one capable of conducting the complex surgeries that were previously unavailable.

Since NPH could not afford to build the center itself, the Dalys began a fundraising campaign, starting with a story written about Angela’s condition in their local paper. The Dalys then turned to their friends and family, and to the Internet, to continue raising awareness and funds. They were able to raise the start-up funding of $300,000, as well as $100,000 toward the endowment fund that will underpin the annual operational costs in the future.

This spring they were able to open the doors to the new Holy Family Surgery Center (HFSC), a unique facility that performs mainly orthopedic surgeries, since that is Dr. Daly’s specialty. In the future, the Dalys hope to expand their offerings to ear, nose and throat; hernia repairs; gynecological and urological surgeries, and other procedures. (Learn more about the HFSC from its official website).

Unlike other mission hospitals Dr. Daly visited, which are only open a few weeks every year, HFSC aims to be open year round. “Our vision is to have a self-sustaining, Honduran-based ambulatory surgery center staffed every day by Honduran physicians, using and maintaining state-of-art equipment, with volunteers serving a supportive and collaborative role,” he says.

The Dalys lead one of the center’s volunteer medical brigades, comprised almost entirely of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College students in pre-professional or nursing programs. Dr. Daly, assisted by his wife and the students, is able to conduct the more advanced surgeries for which the local doctor is not qualified. For example, the students were able to observe a complex wrist fracture surgery that would have cost $10,000 in the United States. They also aided in the removal of a tumor from the chest of one of the Rancho’s children, performed by a local Honduran general surgeon. The nursing students practice their pre- and post-op techniques under the supervision of Lulu Daly and other volunteer R.N.s.

This year, in order to increase the visibility of NPH and its new center, the Dalys’ son, Michael Daly ’11, started a Notre Dame chapter of Friends of the Orphans (FOTO). FOTO is one of the main fundraising arms for NPH. Donations made to FOTO can be specifically designated for the HFSC if the donor so desires. The ND chapter also sponsors volunteer trips to Rancho with the Dalys. These trips welcome both the pre-professional students, as well as general volunteers to help with the programming and construction at Rancho.

“By promoting awareness of the brutal reality of children in poverty within our world today, FOTO hopes to widen students' world view and knowledge about third world countries,” Michael says. Contact Michael Daly by e-mail, Dr. Peter Daly by e-mail, or visit FOTO’s national website for more information or to get involved.