Ric Jones, an audiologist from Good Shepherd Medical Center, called the two-week trip a “complete experience.”

“Would I do it again? Probably not next week, but I certainly would,” he said.

The team of doctors and nurses stayed on Weno, an island with about the same population as Hermiston. They saw about 360 patients and performed 62 operations, said Dr. Richard Flaiz, an ear, nose and throat doctor from Good Shepherd who helped coordinate the trip for Canvasback Ministries.

“Mission accomplished,” Flaiz said.

Patients came from far and wide, some traveling 100 miles on the open ocean in small boats, Flaiz said.

Jones said he dispensed more than 40 hearing aids along with a year’s supply of batteries.

Flaiz said the majority of the ear problems Micronesians face would not be as serious in the United State.s.

“Here you get right in and get it treated and it’s likely to clear up,” Flaiz said. “But when you don’t have access to care, you have problems.”

Dr. Terry Wigley, an ear, nose and throat doctor from St. Anthony in Pendleton, also made the trip.

The two hospitals donated medicine, supplies, equipment and money.

In addition to dealing with periods when the hospital they were working in was without electricity or running water, and after picking up stomach bugs, the team had to contend with occasional heart-wrenching cases in children who lived without access to doctors and medicine.

Jones told a story of one little girl born with a cleft palate who had been orphaned in the past year. He said he tried to keep his composure, but broke down when he looked in her eyes.

Jones and Flaiz said the organization is working on a plan to fly her to a hospital in Hawaii for surgery.

“In the same sense we were able to provide some smiles,” Jones said, who recalled a young man he fitted with a hearing aid who had never heard television or radio before. “He was just smiling all over the place.”

The team worked with the staff at the island’s hospital and trained them to use some of the equipment they brought, including a surgical microscope Good Shepherd donated.

“So we’re not only leaving them with more equipment, but the skills to use it,” said Claudia Benson Flaiz, one of the nurses who went on the trip.

It wasn’t all work. Dr. Flaiz said that he and Wigley took the opportunity to scuba dive in the world-renowned Truuk Lagoon and explore sunken Japanese naval ships from World War II.

By Andrew Binion, East Oregonian