CORINTH – In a Vietnamese province where land mines still blow off human limbs and take lives almost weekly, Roger Marshall’s dream is finally starting to take shape.

Marshall has been raising money for several years for a much-needed orthotic-prosthetic rehabilitation center in Quang Ngai, Vietnam, that was started there about two years ago.

The former British Royal Airforce medical corpsman worked as a prosthetist-orthotist for 41 years, including 21 years in Bangor. Now partially retired and living in Corinth, Marshall has not stopped working for the cause he so adamantly believes in.

From 1968 to 1972, Marshall worked as a volunteer for the American Friends Service Committee at the Quang Ngai Province Quaker Rehabilitation Center, training Vietnamese students and serving civilian war casualties. He has returned to the country several times, and has seen firsthand the need for a rehabilitation center at Quang Ngai, a provincial town on the coast of Vietnam.

Approximately 6 percent of Quang Ngai’s 1.3 million people are disabled in some way, Marshall said. Many of them are peasants and can’t afford to travel to the rehab centers to the north or south of them for care.

“They have either lost limbs, [or] they have had spinal injuries and are paralyzed and in wheelchairs,” he said. And many who have not been injured by land mines suffer from “post-polio” and cerebral palsy, and there are numerous cases of congenital deformity.

The country is still feeling the effects of the Vietnam War in many ways, but primarily through live land mines hidden beneath the ground and the long-lasting effects of Agent Orange.

“There’s barely a week goes by when somebody is not injured or killed or loses a limb or something like that,” Marshall said. Children who are forced to hunt for scrap metal for survival and farmers working in their fields often are injured or killed when land mines are triggered.

For three days last week, Marshall has been host to Dr. Thanh VanDo, a Vietnamese surgeon who works at Danang Rehabilitation Center, and Cuc Van Hoang, the center’s director.

“They are going around to hospitals and rehab centers [in the United States] and gaining as much knowledge as they can on how we do things over here so they can then go back to Vietnam and implement what they’ve learned,” Marshall said.

Between a visit to Eastern Maine Medical Center on Friday and a short sightseeing trip to Dover-Foxcroft to get their first look at snow, the men talked with Marshall about the center at Quang Ngai.

“What we’re going to do is we’re going to help them financially,” Marshall said.

“We decided instead of waiting to raise the full amount … that the need was immediate and to use what funds we have to help now,” Marshall said. “We’re starting off with a smaller center and increasing the size of that as time goes by.”

It’s possible that a larger building that was donated by an American businessman will be made available for the Quang Ngai center, but that would not happen until May, according to Marshall.

“It has been pledged, but we have to wait and make sure all the paperwork is right,” he said. “Seeing is believing.”

Through the Fund for Reconciliation and Development in New York, Marshall has helped raise more than $50,000 toward the Quang Ngai center and plans to start another fund-raising campaign in the near future.

“Fund raising has been very difficult since 9-11 and the Iraq war,” he said. “Many people who are trying to raise money for other countries are having a hard time.”

But Marshall said he has not given up hope.

The center at Quang Ngai already has helped about 400 patients. A few have received prostheses, but many still need them.

“There are thousands who have very old and broken prostheses that need replacing and of all the patients in Quang Ngai, about 95 percent of them, are a result of the war,” Marshall said.

The patients pay if they can afford it and some patients’ care is funded by organizations, Marshall said.

“Those who can afford it, they are asked to pay at least something. If they can afford to pay 100 percent, then they are asked to pay 100 percent. But those who are too poor have to rely on people like us.”

The International Red Cross also has been helping and Marshall said he hopes it will become more involved as the center continues to grow.

More information about the project is available at http://www.vietnamrehab.org. Doctors and physical therapists are needed to help with medical training in Vietnam, but money is what the project really needs, Marshall said. Donations can be sent to: FRD (Fund for Reconciliation Development) Quang Ngai c/o Roger Marshall, C.P. P.O. Box 639 Corinth, 04427.