Making the Crooked Straight

By Daniel Hamon

An upcoming documentary will focus on the work of Rick Hodes:

Born in Long Island, New York and educated at John Hopkins - Dr. Rick Hodes has dedicated his life to helping heal the sick and poor of Ethiopia over the past 20 years. Many of his patients are stricken with tuberculosis of the spine, a disease that creates massive humps on the backs of its victims. Eventually they’re forced into permanent forward-bending posture, which in turn prevents their lungs from working properly, and if left untreated leads to death.

Driven by his devotion to Orthodox Judaism and its belief that “He who saves one life, saves an entire world," Hodes provides these patients with hospital care - arranges for complex overseas surgeries - often paying for these out of his own pocket - and has, thus far, fostered seventeen children in order to provide them with not only proper medical care but a home and an education...Hodes believes the only way to change the world is to be the change.

I first learned about Dr. Rick Hodes from Melissa Fay Greene's There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Her Country's Children:

[Rick Hodes is] a person who had disdained every opportunity to build a prosperous life far from a world of suffering and death. Healthy, lured by no particular financial or career incentives, he waded into the disaster areas of the world (Rwanda, Somalia, Albania, Sudan, Zaire, Tanzania, Lesotho, and Ethiopia), somehow feeling, "This is my fight."

He was a white American doctor. He was widely known, easily spotted. It was said that he would treat anyone who came to him, regardless of ability to pay, regardless of the hour of day or night.

He treated hundreds of patients pro bono as well, in paupers' hospitals and shantytowns  across Addis Ababa. Between forty and fifty Ethiopian children and adults had been sent by Hodes to the United States or Israel for medical treatment unavailable in Ethiopia.

Photo - The Jewish Daily Forward

Comments

[Ligia]

Dr. Rick Hodes is amazing, God bless him for ever.

Thank you for let me know about this important things and have the oportunity read your comment I find more important.