MBL Falmouth Forum

Rick Hodes, a native of Long Island, traveled to Ethiopia in 1985 as a Fulbright professor, intending to spend one year at the medical school. He is still in Ethiopia. He has worked in refugee camps in Rwanda, Zaire, Tanzania, and Albania, and been the doctor for 70,000 Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. In 1999, working at Mother Teresa’s Mission in Addis Ababa, Hodes met two abandoned orphans with TB of the spine and >100 degree deformities. Unable to get them free surgery, he adopted them, added them to his health insurance, and brought them to Texas for care. Hodes now has an Ethiopian family and a practice of what has been dubbed the largest collection of the worst spine deformities in the world. He partners with doctors in India, Ghana, Egypt, Israel, and America, and they have done over 1000 surgeries. Hodes is a CNN Hero, subject of a book This is a Soul: the Mission of Rick Hodes by Marilyn Berger, and topic of several documentary films.

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