What one nurse did.

Abstract

SIT in the parish hall of a downtown Seattle church. I get the spirit of the place from the minister, who tells me, “We try to listen to the people. We do what we can.” Present are a dozen people who have come from different parts of the United States, Panama, and Nicaragua. Our purpose is to discern ways in which the Episcopal Church can be more effective as a force for world peace. We listen while folks urge our support for economic conversion, meaning a weaning of defense contractors away from military funding, and toward socially useful production instead. We hear from people encouraging us to support the freedom movement in South Africa. Then come heartrending descriptions of the sufferings of the El Salvadoran people, with insistent pleas that something be done immediately to stop the violence there. So much of it is financed by U.S. tax dollars, perhaps $2 million per day in “aid.” Cynthia Finney, a nurse, begins to describe NEHAP, the Nicaraguan Episcopal Health Assistance Project, which she has founded with a few others. This is a humanitarian project expressing the best that is in any religious heritage. She speaks of her project’s beginning while she shows us slides of Managua’s 250-bed Velez Paiz Hospital, one of Nicaragua’s two children’s hospitals. Velez Paiz is a teaching hospital for physicians, nurses, and technicians; it is devoted especially to treating burned children. The difficulties of working in any hospital are familiar enough to nurses. What makes the story of Velez Paiz particularly arresting, however, is its endlessly repeated theme: a persistent lack of medicines, chronic deficiencies in medical supplies, and the unavailability of basic equipment. NEHAP was formed to remedy these deficits. All of us who hear the NEHAP story are taken with