To the Editor:

There are multitudinous ways in which a community manifests its heart: caring for its neighbors, supporting town employees, ensuring quality schools, community centers, and the like. But another is in offering quiet, humble, and unheralded sacrifice (although I am now, intentionally, removing that last part). For many years my wife and I have travelled to Honduras with medical and dental teams to provide world class healthcare to areas that, according to the WHO, are in great need. When we started our own organization last year to work in a more collaborative model, we needed doctors. Newtown answered that call resoundingly.

Dr Eric Chanko, a long-time resident, volunteered. It is an arduous trip. It is physically demanding. It requires being away from work, and usually away from family. But Dr Chanko quickly agreed to help us, as he has helped us in the past. There are no salutations or encomiums which flow from this trip (although, yes, we did give team members a mug, so there’s that). Dr Chanko took this trip because he is a skilled doctor, a patient-centric doctor, who although he knows there is a line of another 100 patients outside his cramped exam room door, will take the time to listen, to interact, and to the fullest extent possible, to heal. And everyone one of those 100 left the clinic feeling they had been heard. Dr. Chanko, even with canted Spanish, helped hundreds of people over the course of a week in May, 2015.

As if that was not enough, he did something else which shows his character. He brought his daughter, a high school student. Because he thought this trip was important and would provide her with perspective, knowledge, and a human, almost all too human, experience. And he was right. She rose to the occasion and exhibited a level of maturity and self-reliance (take that Emerson! Margaret Fuller was right) that, thankfully, is not usually necessary in the states. This exemplary behavior is a reflection of parenting, but also of a community which fosters that type of engagement.

In the end, our group, TJIF/Community Health Partnership Honduras, treated over a 1,000 people in both the medical and dental clinics, as well as participated in cultural activities, like getting our tuchuses kicked in basketball by a 76-year-old, 5-foot tall woman wearing a full length skirt (the soccer game went better, slightly better, for us). Dr Chanko and his daughter were indispensable, and although I know this laudatory public announcement will embarrass them, I just need to thank him, his daughter, and the town he represented with such aplomb.  Our sincerest and deepest thanks to a great practitioner and family man, Dr Eric Chanko.

Muchas gracias.

Terence Noonan

Jennifer Smith

TJIF

280 Hillside Avenue, Needham, Mass.        May 27, 2015

(Editor’s note: Dr Chanko and Dr Dan Federman’s trip to Honduras was the subject of “Newtown Doctors Join To Provide A Week Of Healing, A Lifetime Of Health,” which was published in The Newtown Bee and online at NewtownBee.com on April 30 and May 1.)