Vietnamese clinic gets big boost

When you’re building your dream from the ground up, as Roger Marshall is doing in Vietnam, you learn to measure progress patiently and in small steps.

For nearly 20 years now, the retired prosthetist who lives in East Corinth has devoted his time to establishing a clinic in the city of Quang Ngai to provide artificial limbs to people maimed and crippled by the detonation of unexploded mines and bombs buried throughout the countryside during the war.

His untiring efforts so far have yielded a rudimentary though invaluable medical operation consisting of one building with a small staff of technicians and local Vietnamese doctors who treat poor victims of the region who would otherwise have to travel several hours to the nearest prosthetic center in Da Nang.

The ambitious project has been an equal mix of satisfaction and frustration for Marshall, a former British Royal Air Force medic who spent four years during the war training South Vietnamese students to make prosthetics for their injured countrymen.

While his nonprofit organization has raised well over $50,000 to get the clinic up and running, the financial support necessary to expand it has been difficult as lingering memories of that long-ago war are supplanted in the national consciousness by the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It takes everything I’ve got just to remain optimistic about the project,” the soft-spoken, 70-year-old Marshall said recently. “The war may be long over, but enormous problems remain that continue to affect the people there.”

Unlike in Europe, where the task of recovering unexploded ordnance began soon after the end of World War II, Vietnam’s most heavily infested regions only recently have been examined for the potential dangers that lurk underfoot. A partnership between the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation has produced a pilot study that is regarded as the crucial first step in determining the full extent of the perils posed by the buried explosives.

According to Vietnamese defense officials, Marshall said, there are still between 350,000 and 850,000 tons of unexploded bombs and some 3 million land mines spread out across the country. They’ve caused an estimated 30,000 deaths since the war ended and more than 60,000 injuries.

“The most important work, however, is to actually start digging these things out of the ground, and that’s a job that will take a long, long time,” said Marshall, who has treated many of those victims during his regular visits to Vietnam.

After years of plodding progress with his humble clinic in Quang Ngai, a poor farming and fishing region where more than 4,000 people require artificial limbs and bone-straightening orthotic devices, Marshall recently got word of a gift that promises to provide the impetus he’s been waiting for so long.

An American businessman and philanthropist in Hong Kong, after hearing about the rehabilitation clinic through the International Red Cross, has donated a building of approximately 60-by-40 feet that will allow the small operation to expand significantly.

“It’s like manna from heaven,” said Marshall, who plans to see the new addition when he and his wife, Margaret, return to Vietnam for a month in late June.

The prefabricated structure, which is being shipped in two enormous crates from Hong Kong to Quang Ngai by way of Da Nang, will be equipped to serve as a fully functional prosthetic and orthotic facility. The building will allow room for a patients’ ward, where people will be able to stay for up to two weeks while they are being measured and fitted with prosthetic devices.

Even the shipping crates the building arrives in will be transformed into a dormitory-style dwelling for patients.

There are also plans for a small operating room in the new building, Marshall said, where Vietnamese orthopedic surgeons can make badly deformed limbs suitable for the devices.

“Another massive concern in Vietnam is the affects of Agent Orange from the war,” he said, “which causes not only cancers but terrible deformities in children, some of them born without arms or legs. It’s becoming even more of a problem than amputations from unexploded ordnance because it’s so insidious.”

As the need for the clinic continues to grow, so has Marshall’s commitment to finally completing a circle begun when the war ended more than 30 years ago.

“I’m not a deeply religious man,” he said, “but maybe when the time comes for me to die I’ll at least be able to say that I didn’t completely waste my life on God’s good earth.”