2. Ines Allen and the Birth of IMA
• Poor people don’t have proper access to healthcare services.
And when they don’t receive the medical attention they need,
they suffer the consequences.
• Ines Allen knows what this is like. She grew up in a poor family
in Ecuador and lost her brother to an undiagnosed heart
problem at the age of 16.
• Her family was so devastated by her brother’s death that they
immigrated to the United States to begin a new life with new
opportunities.
• But Ines never forgot her brother’s death or how poverty
prevents people from getting the healthcare services they need.
She vowed to do something about it. She founded Rancho
Mirage, Calif.-based IMAHelps).
3. IMAHelps
• Since Ines founded IMAHelps in 2000, the group has
organized medical humanitarian missions to some of the most
impoverished areas of Ecuador and Nicaragua, Haiti and Tibet
and provided a wide range of medical services to nearly
100,000 people.
• People travel by foot, by bus and on the backs of pickups and
flatbed trucks to see our volunteers for a chance to receive
medical care they could never afford.
4. IMAHelps
• While the specific makeup of each medical mission varies, our
teams typically include pharmacists, pediatricians, general
internal medicine doctors, OBGYNs, dentists, eye doctors,
prosthetists, neurologists, urologists, general surgeons,
cardiologists, orthopedic surgeons, plastic and maxillofacial
surgeons, anesthesiologists, scrub techs, nurses and
translators.
• Perhaps best of all, IMAHelps volunteers not only provide
critical healthcare services to people who cannot afford such
care, but they often perform surgeries that change people’s
lives.
5. Nataly Benavidez
Nataly Benavidez was only 6 years old when fireworks exploded in
her home in Ecuador and burned nearly half of her body,
horribly scaring her arms, stomach and legs. The accident was
so devastating to Nataly’s self esteem that she became a
depressed and reclusive child who never left her home.
6. Nataly Benavidez
• But IMAHelps volunteers changed Nataly’s outlook on life and
gave her new hope for the future by performing a series of
skin graft operations that have restored her movement so that
she can play like a normal kid again.
7. Darwin Bolaños
Darwin Bolaños was a 35-year-old chauffeur in Ecuador when he
lost both of his legs from the knee down in a traffic accident that
devastated his family, particularly his 10-year-old daughter and
six-
year-old son.
“To see him go from being very healthy and fine one day to
missing both legs the next was very hard,” said Anita Tello,
Darwin’s wife. “It was very hard on our children, too. At first, they
were just happy to see him alive. But after that, it was very hard on
them. I had problems with my son in particular. It was very hard for
him to accept the fact that he may not be able to play soccer and
other games with his dad like the other kids could do with their
dads.”
8. Darwin Bolaños
But IMAHelps volunteers fitted Bolaños with two new prosthetic legs
that
enabled him to walk on his own again without crutches. Bolaños,
through tears, said the new legs would enable him to go back to work
and also help his wife around the house. He also plans to play ball with
his children once again.
9. Santos de Cruz Meza
• For 67 years, Santos de Cruz Meza was the neighborhood
pariah. Born with a cleft lip in a poor village in Nicaragua, her
deformity worsened with age, twisting her nose while the top of
her mouth produced a frightening jumble of rotting, unusable
teeth.
“She wouldn’t dare go outside without a towel wrapped around
her face,” said Guadalupe Gonzalez Cruz, her 22-year-old
daughter. “Everyone made fun of her.”
10. Santos de Cruz Meza
• Moved by her suffering, IMAHelps volunteers removed Cruz’s teeth
and shaved her maxilla so that she could be fitted with dentures.
Then they sewed her cleft lip shut, closing the fissure that had
subjected her to nearly seven decades or torment and ridicule.
“The first thing I’m going to do when
I get home,” Santos de Cruz Meza
said after surgery, “is take a walk
down the street, just like everybody
else.”
11. Tania Regalado Sanchez
• When Tania Regalado Sanchez was born in Quito, Ecuador, the
deformities in her partially undeveloped face were so severe
that her father abandoned her and her mother.
12. Tania Regalado Sanchez
• But IMAHelps volunteers gave little Tania hope for brighter
future
by flying her to the U.S. and providing this brave 9-year-old girl
with a series of reconstructive surgeries that changed her life.
13. Tania Regalado Sanchez
• To top it off, before she went into surgery, IMAHelps
volunteers outfitted Tania with new clothes and took her
Disneyland.
14. The Impact on IMAHelps Volunteers
• Volunteering on IMAHelps medical missions enriches the lives of the
volunteers in ways they could never imagine.
• “When you do Third World medicine, it’s the purest medicine –
medicine for people who have no hope. And for me, the spiritual
reward for doing this kind of work is immeasurable.”
--Dr. Christopher Tiner, a plastic and maxillofacial surgeon
with practices in Pasadena and Beverly Hills, Calif.
15. The Impact on IMAHelps Volunteers
•
IMAHelps volunteer Betty
Gray, left, with 6-year-
old Aysel Galeano and
her mom after Aysel
had a club foot
operation in Nicaragua
that would enable her to
walk normally for the
first time in her life.
“I just love being able to help people who can’t help
themselves. They don’t have the money. They don’t have
the resources. (But) we can come in and do work that is life
changing.”
-- Betty Gray, RN, Loma Linda University Medical Center
16. The Impact on IMAHelps Volunteers
Panna Jarussi (right), an RN with
Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage,
shows a nursing student from Mount St.
Mary's College (Megan Soqui) how to
check an IV during a recent IMAHelps
mission in Nicaragua.
“It’s been an eye-opening experience. I think all nurses
need a humbling, life-changing experience to put aside
their ethnocentricities and do what’s right for mankind.”
-- Panna Jarussi, RN, Alaska Regional Hospital,
18. IMAHelps Mission Peru
IMA’s next 10-day medical mission will take place August 9th
through August 18th , 2013 in Peru.
For more information on how can support IMAHelps, please
donate on our secure website:
https://www.IMAHelps.org
or by mail: IMA
PO Box 2727
Rancho Mirage, CA 92270
IMAHelps is a 501 (c)(3) Non-Profit Public Charity
EIN # 83-0349334
