Rotary sponsors club foot surgeries for Honduran children





By Michael Zapf, DPM

I’m on my way to Honduras with a team of surgeons to perform club-foot surgeries. The trip is sponsored by the Rotary clubs of Westlake Sunrise and Agoura Hills-Oak Park. We’ll perform six or eight surgeries per day.


I’ve often been asked, "Why Honduras?" and "Why do they have so many club feet?"


My answer to Honduras is always, why not Honduras? The children in Honduras are as sweet and beautiful as anywhere else on earth and deserve to walk just as much as any child anywhere.


In addition, we have a special contact with Honduras—Sandy Schultz, "the Mother Theresa of the Conejo." After her retirement, she joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Honduras. Since that time she has made Honduras her special cause. She raises money and interest in Honduras in the Conejo for seven months of the year and then spends five months in Honduras helping hundreds of families. She arranges for young patients from all over the country to make their way to the capital of Tegucigalpa, where our public hospital is located.


One in 1,000 babies is born with a club foot. Normally these children are entered into a program of stretching and casting in their first weeks of life. With proper treatment, club feet are quickly corrected. Without such treatment, the condition becomes so rigid that only surgery can help.


In Honduras, like in so much of the developing world, there is no treatment for the poor, and these children grow up walking, essentially, on their ankle. This is a very painful and debilitating condition. Many of the children we see in Honduras cannot walk the rough mountain paths to school. Lack of literacy makes their future very bleak.


The nine doctors and five residents who are making this trip to Honduras do so at their own expense, including paying their own airfare and hotel bills. The Rotary clubs are contributing $10,000 needed for supplies, including those we leave with the Honduran doctors to care for these patients after we return home.


The sponsoring Rotary clubs raise this money through dinner auctions, golf tournaments and, especially, a car raffle. My club will again be sponsoring a car raffle, which will soon be underway, with the car on display for a month at The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks.


Dr. Michael Zapf is a podiatrist in private practice with offices in Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks. For more information, call his office at (818) 707-3668 or see his Website at www.conejofeet.com.



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