Wayne R. McKinny
M.D. Founder and President Emeritus
I graduated from The University of Texas in Austin with a degree in Radio and Television but ended up working for the late Dr. Tom Dooley in the home office of his organization, MEDICO, in public relations and assisting his brother, Malcolm, who was his office manager. Subsequent, Dr. Tom sent me overseas to build a hospital for the poor in northeastern Cambodia. Later, I was the administrator of this hospital and another Dooley hospital in Kratie, Cambodia. When Dr. Tom died at the age of 34, I returned to New York City(the site of his home office) and did the necessary science undergraduate courses at NYU in order to qualify for entrance to Medical School at State University of New York in Brooklyn.
My internship was through the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine at St. Francis Hospital in Honolulu. Then I returned to southeast asia for the Dooley Foundation to work in Laos. First in a hospital on the isle of Khong in the middle of the Mekong River near Cambodia and subsequently in Ban Houei Sai in northern Laos 35 miles from China in the middle of the Golden Triangle.
After the Dooley Foundation faltered financially and medicine and supplies were inadequate, I went to Vietnam to work for Project Concern as their Area Director and to build a hospital for them at Dampao near Dalat in central Vietnam.
When the hospital was completed and up and running for several months, I moved to Saigon to begin providing medical care for seven orphanages. My primary one was An Lac which Dr. Dooley helped Madame Ngai, the orphanage director, start at the end of the French Indochinese War. My wife and I adopted our first two sons from An Lac when we first came to Vietnam from Laos. Betty Moul Tisdale, a mother of ten and an old friend with whom I worked with as a volunteer for Dr. Dooley, supported me in this endeavor. All while working as Senator Jacob Javits secretary. She raised $500 a month to support my family and $5,000 a month to feed the orphans. Now she was very organized. This was the job of my life. I sent hundreds of orphans for adoption all over the world.
Through Terres Des Hommes all over Europe and through friends, all over the U.S. And before I left Saigon, I built another hospital. This one for premature orphans and those who were going to die from anaclitic depression. When a child is not picked up, loved and hugged, and not stimulated by loving attention, they simply shrivel up and die. It is called anaclitic depression. Their world becomes so terrible they withdraw into themselves and quit eating which leads to severe malnutrition and its sequel, a devastated immune system. Then the first fetid air that blows across their spot on the floor of the orphanage wipes them out. I found most of them died from pneumocystis pneumonia. When I went to work at some of my orphanages, the death rate from this was as much as 80% in the first two years of life. Never mind the devastation caused by most of the orphanages never having enough money to properly feed them.
After several years, I returned to north America to get more medical training and to give my little boys roots and get them American passports. I did not want to wander the face of the world with them still Vietnamese citizens. I did a pediatric residency at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, then a fellowship in tropical medicine and parasitology at Toronto General and then came to Hawaii as Chief Resident in Pediatrics at their pediatric hospital. I entered private practice in Hawaii and became a Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Hawaii Medical School. While in Hawaii, I started the organization(initially called VIVA...vietnamese immigrant volunteer assistance, which ultimately became the Hawaii Refugee Resettlement agency) which resettled 90% of the Indochinese refugees who came to Hawaii; the first chapter of the national associate of the deat(NAD) in Hawaii and ran it for five years and Adopt, an agency which brought hard to place orphans for medical services and surgeries and arranged to have them adopted by loving families afterward.
Everything was free to the families except airfare to Hawaii and that was made free to them if they could not afford it. If they loved one of my kids, that was all that counted. On retiring I moved to Palm Springs and began working with the poor and homeless. And I also continued bringing children from overseas and getting them fixed up with surgeries they could not get in their country. On June 29, 2006, I brought Ellie and her mom back to California for the 5th and final go around of surgeries to save her life...this time for cosmetic clean up. She had her 22nd surgery on July 29th in San Diego and will have several more before she returns to Russia in one to two years. She first came over at age two years and was l6 years old on June 4, 2006. I received two medals in Vietnam from their government, the highest a civilian can receive...one from the Ministry of Health and the other from the Ministry of Social Welfare. And in l978, I received the highest award(Grand Officer Grand Cross) from the Order of Queen Emma in Hawaii presented by the Governor for by work with the refugees.
The most dramatic moments of my life were four baby lifts of orphans to the US while I was Chief Resident in Pediatrics in Hawaii in l975. Two of these were from orphanages which were ones I looked after while
living in Saigon. And I participated in another baby lift of orphans born of rape by Pakistani soldiers during their invasion of Bangladesh. One year after this war of independence of Bangladesh and while I was studying in Canada, four Canadian friends and I went to Bangladesh a year after their war of independence and brought back orphans which were adopted in Canada. Their were other moments in my life which made me who I am but after all this typing and remembering, I do not have the physical or emotional energy to write about. Let me just say I have been busy in my life.
Aloha!
Wayne McKinny, M.D.
8/6/06 |
