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PRIMARY CARE PHYSICIANS –
MEDICAL STUDENT PERSPECTIVE
Medical
Mission
to Neiva,
Colombia
By (left to right) Daniel Perez, DDS; Roberto Fajardo, PhD;
Nicole Hernandez, DDS; Sean Catlett (inset).
The San Antonio community has a reputation for helping those
in need. One only needs to remember the city’s response to evacuees
after Hurricane Katrina and the current mobilization to help those
potentially stricken with the corona virus. Service-oriented medical
students, residents, and faculty from the University of the Incarnate
Word School of Osteopathic Medicine and the University of Texas
Health Science Center at San Antonio continue this tradition, work-
ing together to help indigent children with deformities as part of
the Healing the Children medical mission to Neiva, Colombia. This
amazing medical mission, truly a traveling, comprehensive clinic,
provides surgical care for children with cleft lip and palate, a variety have been invaluable according to past trainee participants.
of deformities and burn scar contractures, as well as untreated club
foot and hip dysplasia.
Founded in 1993 by former Colombian-born San Antonio resi-
dent, Carlos Fajardo, this mission has continued for twenty-six con-
secutive years. Each year the mission team, with approximately 100
surgeons, physicians, nurses, speech therapists, orthodontists, den-
tists and more, visit Neiva and perform more than 150 surgeries in
four and a half days. Over its history, this program has provided
approximately 4,000 free surgical procedures, thousands of hours
of speech therapy, thousands of dollars in free dental equipment,
and many hours of public health training in the non-surgical treat-
ment of club foot and hip dysplasia.
For the past eight years, Daniel Perez, DDS and Roberto Fajardo,
PhD have led a local team of students and residents on the trip.
Their local team fundraises through events such as the annual Clubs
20 San Antonio Medicine • April 2020
and Scrubs for Kids charity golf tournament, while additionally
making significant clinical and logistical contributions to the medical
mission. Dr. Perez is an associate professor of Oral and Maxillofa-
cial Surgery and Program Director for the department at UT Health
San Antonio. Dr. Fajardo is an associate professor of Anatomy and
Biomedical Science at the University of the Incarnate Word School
of Osteopathic Medicine. He is also the logistical director of the
trip. To help better train the next generation of physicians, Drs.
Perez and Fajardo have taken medical students, as well as orthope-
dics and OMFS residents, to Colombia every year. The experiences
Stories abound from this mission trip, but one helps to charac-
terize the comprehensive care provided by the Healing the Children
program to Neiva, Colombia. At about the age of 7, one of the oral
surgeons met a boy we’ll call Federico (not real name of patient).
He had been orphaned as a child because his parents did not feel
they had the resources to raise him with a large cleft palate defor-
mity. Federico’s grandmother, who volunteered to raise him, heard
about Healing the Children’s medical mission from a friend. Fed-
erico, always joyful, began to show more confidence and happiness
after his initial palate surgery. Unfortunately, he continued to have
major speech impediments due to his reliance on his epiglottis to
produce sound. Three years later, Federico returned to our program
to receive an intense three-day speech therapy session from the mis-
sion’s speech therapy team from Teacher’s College, Columbia Uni-
versity. Federico’s grandmother insisted that he keep up with his