Karen Soderberg-Gomez assists a baby. For some in the Dominican Republic, Soderberg-Gomez provides their only medical assistance.

Photos courtesy of Karen Soderberg-Gomez

Karen Soderberg-Gomez has a steady date with her husband each winter. They pack whatever they can in a backpack, fill two suitcases with medical supplies and join a handful of others to board a plane and fly to the Dominican Republic.

There, they devote their two weeks of vacation time to mountain residents in need of medical care.

They do this at their own expense. Soderberg-Gomez spends the other 50 weeks of the year filling the spare bedroom of her Carolina home with medical supplies collected from friends and family, or purchased at cost through South County Hospital, where she is a nurse practitioner in the Wound Center. Donations also come in from Charlestown’s Ocean Pharmacy, she said.

What she, her husband, Jorge, and the other volunteers see when they arrive in the Dominican Republic are “100 patients a day,” sometimes more. The patients are suffering from parasites, scabies and malnourishment — and they haven’t seen medication since the last time the group, Intercultural Nursing Inc., visited.

“We show up with 30,000 tablets of Tylenol,” said Soderberg-Gomez. Two weeks later, she said, “there’s not much left.”

After ministering to more than 1,000 people living in remote mountain areas, the volunteers return with empty suitcases, but full hearts.

“The people are so humble and appreciative of anything you do.”

SODERBERG-GOMEZ is just one of three people connected with South County Hospital who spent part of their winter overseas, bringing medical skills, supplies and a bit of Rhode Island to needy people in Latin America. The others are a recently retired trustee and the hospital’s president.

Hospital President Louis R. Giancola spent a week last month in a rural Honduras village with a group of physicians, nurses and other health professionals who volunteer their time through the Shoulder-to-Shoulder program, a partnership between family-medicine training programs and communities in Honduras and other resource-poor countries.

Giancola, 62, and his wife, pediatrician Pam High, made the trip for the first time, he said.

“And I can’t wait to go back,” he said. “It was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.”

With suitcases full of medical supplies, Giancola and his wife, along with other team members, saw more than 200 patients on the first day in the rural agricultural village where they were stationed.

“Some people had walked from as far as three hours away,” he said.

Giancola said while there, he worked with the community leaders to understand their perception of health needs and he also helped with registration, performing eye exams, and administering fluoride treatments to children.

They conducted eye screenings, checked for dental problems, and in the area where “parasites are a major problem,” they treated a child with a severe abscess. Then they tried to determine what can be done in the future to establish a more permanent medical resource where the water supply is poor and travel difficult.

The hospital president said they paid their own expenses, living in a dorm they set up in a school, using up vacation time to make the trip.

He said he hopes to return before the year is up.

RUTH WALDMAN, 67, an associate dean emerita of the University of Rhode Island College of Nursing and a Richmond resident, had a “vision of world health” that she long wanted to act upon.

Though she is now retired after 30 years at URI, in the late 1990s Waldman discussed with another faculty member her hope to set up a program for undergraduates so they could practice their nursing skills in another country. They heard about Intercultural Nursing, a nonprofit organization founded in 1985 to deliver sustainable health care in poor rural areas of the Dominican Republic. Through a small grant, she said, they traveled there to investigate the situation before bringing students along.

In 2000, they made their first trip, “and we’ve been going back ever since.”

“We take medical and personal hygiene supplies,” she said. “Things as simple as shampoo are extremely expensive there.”

Her friends save up hotel-sized shampoo and soap, and give them to her throughout the year.

“These people are poor … and can’t afford these things, and they might not be able to get them to begin with,” she said.

Waldman, a longtime hospital trustee, and her husband, Michael, a marine surveyor, make the trip with Intercultural Nursing each winter, providing not just supplies, but also basic health care.

“We love it. Some of the villages are almost inaccessible and the people are very poor, and yet they have a level of happiness related to being with family. They have faith and hope.”

SODERBERG-GOMEZ, 54, first heard about Intercultural Nursing when she was a senior at the University of Rhode Island, having signed up for course work after raising her children.

Students can apply to participate in the two-week program as part of their credit hours, which is originally why she signed up. But she has been returning each year since, six times in all. The trip costs more than $1,000, not counting what is spent during the year gathering medical supplies.

“They don’t have antibiotics,” she said of the Dominican residents they treat. Even items as simple as toothpaste and soap are handed out. Soderberg-Gomez describes the villages as being on the border of Haiti, mostly long distances from hospitals of any kind. The two countries share the island of Hispaniola, which is east of Cuba.

Running water is rare. Mostly residents collect their own water from rivers, or pump it from wells. Poverty is rampant.

“These are not vacation spots,” she said.

In the clinics the volunteers set up, Soderberg-Gomez said, they see patients with ailments ranging from rashes to HIV/AIDS. If the patient has a problem more serious than they can handle, they’ll work to get them to a hospital, but distance and transportation often create a hardship for the people, so the volunteers work to arrange transport, too. The hospital in the capital is four hours away from most of the villages they visit.

A photo album documenting her numerous trips shows simple structures, rural life, and beautiful children playing in a cement yard.

Though the volunteers see many malnourished children, Soderberg-Gomez said, the children are also busy playing outdoors, something she has been seeing too infrequently in this country, she said.

“The kids are happy,” she said. “And they love Americans.”

DESPITE THE CHUNK of time and money required to take part in the program, those involved said they’ll return.

“I just kept going back,” said Soderberg-Gomez. Though she is already in a day-to-day position of helping others, the Dominican Republic trips, she said, offers her “a chance to give something back.”

Soon after returning from the first trip, she said, she and Jorge, 68 — a retired state employee who worked in group homes — decided they wanted to return.

Jorge, who is from Ecuador, works as an interpreter when the couple travels to the Dominican Republic.

“It’s great to do this together in our almost golden years,” she said. It has become a given that they’ll make another trip, bypassing the comfortable resorts to do what they can to help the residents of the rural villages.

Giancola, too, said that despite the challenges he faced with the language and weather he felt motivated by providing service overseas, as opposed to on this continent, and he plans to return.

“There’s a lot of need in this country, too,” he said. “But I don’t think one necessarily rules out the other. I think you can contribute to both, but it’s important to reach out to other cultures.”

Donations to Intercultural Nursing Inc. can be forwarded to Ruth and Mike Waldman, trip leaders, 61 Sherman Ave., Kenyon, RI 02836. Information about Shoulder to Shoulder can be found at www.shouldertoshoulder.org.

afleming@projo.com