By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Nobody can accuse Dr. Rick Hodes of not being busy. Aside from his work with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, for which he runs the medical program in Ethiopia to give wellness checks for immigrants being airlifted to Israel, he is — on a volunteer basis — responsible for the health of about 7,500 sick and destitute Ethiopians at a Catholic mission in Addis Ababa, where he specializes in treating heart disease, spinal diseases and cancer, and for the fundraising to send as many patients as he can to countries like Ghana for surgery.
“I’m the only person who’s treating spine disease, so I’m like a magnet for spine patients. Spine patients are coming to me from all over the place,” Hodes told JTNews.
Hodes visited Seattle earlier this month to raise funds for JDC projects in Ethiopia and to talk with participants of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s Maimonides Society doctors’ group. Getting people treatment there is a much different prospect than getting people help here, Hodes says, both in terms of cost and availability.
“I hope that in March of this year I will send a bunch of spine patients abroad, maybe 25 to Ghana, so I’m going to have to raise $300,000 for them,” Hodes said. “On the other hand, in America, $300,000 would get you one or one-and-a-half spine surgeries, and I’m getting 20 for the same amount.”
If Hodes had any sort of life plan when he first set off for this poverty-stricken country on the horn of Africa 22 years ago, he certainly didn’t get what he bargained for. Life for him now is far different from what almost anyone with a medical degree would expect. He has come to terms with the fact that the mission for which he volunteers is responsible for the health of so many people with illnesses that would seem unfathomable in this part of the world, and he can’t save everyone.
“I’m able to help a fraction of them,” he said.
But he also couldn’t have foreseen some of the joys: His family, for example. He has five sons, all of them adopted Ethiopians whom he saved from uncertain fates. They, and as many as 20 more who stay with him, bring life to the three-house compound in Addis Ababa that Hodes, a once-assimilated Jew from Long Island who years ago turned Orthodox, now calls home.
But he’s also seeing growing similarities as the world becomes smaller.
Where even a decade ago heart problems were more hereditary, they are “switching over to the American pattern of high blood pressure and heart attacks,” Hodes said.
Always-improving technology has given him the benefit of top-tier diagnosticians.
“We have not-perfect, not-fast Internet, and that makes my life a lot better,” Hodes said. “I can do digital images of my x-rays and e-mail them out to doctors around the world. That’s been a major, major change.”
He also has access to a hospital in Rochester, N.Y., where he can send biopsies for diagnosis on the spinal diseases or cancer. He is able to import chemotherapy drugs from India at a fraction of the cost of the U.S. and says he works hard to make the donations he gets stretch as far as he can.
But he doesn’t have everything. Hodes subscribes to a few medical journals, but he doesn’t always have access to refresher courses and other resources, but he says he manages.
“When I have occasions that I don’t quite know how to handle I do a lot of research online,” he says.
But, he adds, being in the trenches with such a heavy load of patients gives him real-world training that he does share with colleagues when he can.
“I’ve gotten experience with all sorts of conditions that I’ve never heard of before. I’m able to do relatively high tech stuff for a low amount of money,” he said.
Hodes makes regular visits to the U.S. to do fundraising for the JDC and his patients. Always having his pitch at the ready nets important treatments, including the tumor removal from a young woman’s brain and her facial reconstruction by one of the world’s foremost neurosurgeons — a doctor Hodes chanced upon during morning services in St. Paul, Minn.
He has been recognized for his work within the Jewish community for years, particularly inside the Federation movement, but the rest of the world is starting to take notice. A book on his work, This Is a Soul: The Mission of Rick Hodes, was released last April and a documentary, Making the Crooked Straight, debuted on HBO around the same time. He told the JTA news service at the time that he’d seen neither.
But Hodes has a simple philosophy on why he continues in what are clearly challenging and often devastating circumstances:
“I just like to help people,” he said. “I like to help people that other people are not interested in.”