HOPE Comes Full Circle in Latin America

LTGJ Hussein

USNS Comfort (T-AH 20)

As LTJG Hussein Rawji gently lifts his MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter off the flight deck, the pitch and roll of the huge ship beneath him becomes immediately more apparent. He quickly gains altitude to get away from the moving landing pad, and speeds away with a team of Project HOPE volunteers in the jumper seats behind him. They quickly near the remote town of Corinto, Nicaragua, leaving the white hull and giant red crosses of the USNS Comfort, the Navy’s floating hospital, far behind.

The team of doctors, nurses, and midwives volunteering with Project HOPE (Health Opportunities for People Everywhere) who are on Lt. Rawji’s helicopter are following a tradition of partnership and co-operation with the US Navy that spans 50 years—back to their namesake, the SS HOPE. The Navy/HOPE team was formed five decades ago, when in 1958 the Navy delivered an ex-supply ship to the infant non-governmental organization (NGO), to be refitted as a hospital ship, the SS Hope, to deliver free health care to the underserved citizens of Latin America and the world.

Hussein has been flying HOPE volunteers all over Latin America for the last three months on the joint Navy/NGO operation Continuing Promise--throughout Haiti, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador. But for Rawji, this flight to Nicaragua is special. It completes a generational circle he couldn’t have dreamed of when he joined the Navy.

Hussein, whose grandparents moved from India to Tanzania, where his parents and he were born, moved to the Miami with his family when he was in high school. He joined the Navy right after graduation, and due to his excellent performance and attitude, was selected to be commissioned as an Officer in 2002. About this time, he made a trip back to Miami to visit his family and met Yesenia Escorcia, the woman who would become his wife three years later. She had moved to Miami from afar as well, coming there with her family as a two-year old.

As Hussein started flight school in 2006, flying in Latin America didn’t even register as a possibility, much less flying in Nicaragua, the land of Yesenia’s heritage.

Yet, here he is, providing high-tech Navy transportation to these HOPE volunteers in rural Corinto, Nicaragua. These volunteers will perform minor and major surgeries, see hundreds of patients, and write thousands of prescriptions—the same work that Yesenia Rawji’s mother, Vilma, did here in Corinto…while she was working onboard the SS Hope nearly 40 years ago.

Project HOPE’s original project, the SS Hope, made a tour of Latin America in the late 1960’s, and stopped here in Corinto. While there, they asked the local medical community for help in delivering primary care and distributing the donated medical supplies. Vilma answered their call, and became one of the earliest HOPE volunteers.

40 years later, having had a daughter, emigrated from her country, and seen her daughter married, Vilma’s legacy of volunteerism, medical aid, and care live on in the next generation.

The ashore landing pad comes into view, and Hussein brings the helo quickly down. As soon as the HOPE volunteers are away, he rises up again and reverses his course—back to the Comfort for the next team of medical professionals ashore. The volunteers squint their eyes to see the helo receding, and as the sound of its steady blades clears the air, they turn towards Corinto—and continue a generation’s worth of work.