BY JENNETT MERIDEN RUSSELL

Janet Stevens and her 16-year-old daughter, Brooke Stevens, are going on a mother-daughter excursion like no other.

The two Manorville residents are heading to El Salvador later this month as part of a mission to provide medical care to underprivileged people in the small Central American country. The medical mission is being sponsored by Blanca’s House, a Huntington-based non-profit organization that provides teams of volunteer medical professionals and other specialists who perform a host of free medical procedures, including major surgeries, for the poor in Central America and South America.

A registered nurse, Ms. Stevens said a friend and fellow nurse, Jenny Ross, had volunteered with Blanca’s House last year and told her about the organization. Ms. Ross noted that volunteers and junior volunteers were needed for the upcoming mission to Ahuachapan, El Salvador, which runs from September 25 to October 1.

“So, I asked my daughter, Brooke, and Jenny asked her daughter, Meaghan,” Ms. Stevens said. “So, they’re both coming as junior volunteers on this trip.”

Blanca’s House is the brainchild of Manorville resident Galo Burbano, a nurse anesthetist who practices in Port Jefferson. Mr. Burbano said he named the organization after his late mother, Blanca Burbano, and geared it to help people in Ecuador, where he was born.

Working in the medical field for roughly 20 years, Mr. Burbano is now the chief nurse anesthetist for Long Island Nurse Anesthetists, a practice that provides anesthesia services for Mather Memorial Hospital, St. Charles Hospital and Eastern Long Island Hospital.

Medical professionals from all three hospitals make up the majority of the Blanca’s House medical teams. A 38-member team is slated to head to El Salvador with the Stevenses and Rosses.

The trip comes on the heels of a mission to Babahoyo, Ecuador, last week, in which 52 team members participated.

Starting with only $15,000 in May 2008, the organization has grown to a point where it has been able to help more than 400 patients. Patients travel miles, most walking on foot for hours, just for the hope of being seen by one of the volunteer doctors or specialists, according to Ms. Stevens.

Among the procedures provided by Blanca’s House’s medical teams are slings, which surgically raise female uteruses and bladders that have become slack in the body because of childbirth and age. The organization also offers general operations such as hernia repairs. But the teams provide plastic surgeries as well, from removing disfiguring and potentially dangerous thyroid tumors to repairing cleft pallets on children.

“There are kids who are 8 years old, who haven’t been able to really eat since they were

born,” Ms. Stevens said. “They go from not smiling to smiling because they’re able to really have a life and feel good about themselves.” The list of medical professionals wanting to volunteer their time and skills for Blanca’s House grows, by word of mouth, with every new mission. In addition to those from Long Island, volunteers have also begun showing up from Georgia, Kentucky and Alabama.

Blanca’s House volunteers, both medical and junior volunteers, pay their own travel expenses and their room and board. Junior volunteers run errands, do clerical work, and perform other minor duties, but can also be called upon to assist in operating rooms, according to Ms. Stevens.

“The junior volunteers are trained to scrub in the operating room,” Ms. Stevens said. “They also deliver supplies to schools in the area and they bring backpacks filled with coloring books, crayons, little Matchbox cars and Barbies for the kids.”

Students from Eastport South Manor High School’s Honor Society, Natural Helpers Club and French Honor Society are also donating various toys and school supplies for the latest mission, according to Brooke.

Ms. Stevens noted that comforting patients and their families is a large part of the responsibility imparted on junior volunteers. Younger patients and family members are particularly appreciative of their youthful supporters, she added.

“Kids respond to kids,” Ms. Stevens said. “So when they’re scared from recovery and waking up from anesthesia, it’s nice to have a young person there to make them smile.”

In preparation for the trip, Brooke shadowed her mother during her rounds at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip. The teen put in 12-hour days with her mom and helped her with minor nursing duties.

She also witnessed several surgeries, which included C-section child deliveries and sling operations—all without passing out. “I was pretty good about the surgeries,” Brooke said. “I didn’t feel nauseous, or anything. It was just really interesting to watch it all happen and see the doctors at work.”

The 16-year-old Eastport South Manor junior said that she feels mentally prepared for the medical mission, even though she and the Blanca’s House medical team will be under armed guard the entire time they are in El Salvador: The small Central American country is on the front lines of Mexico’s deadly drug war.

“I’m a little nervous, but I’m excited too,” Brooke said. “It’s going to be an experience I’ll never forget. I feel like it’s going to be life changing, and I’ll look at things so much differently. And to have this chance at such a young age, I know I’ll never get this opportunity again.”

Quoted from Newsday:

” Tatiana Franco-Rosero, of Ecuador, was told last year by doctors in her homeland that she would have only about a year to live. Franco-Rosero, 28, a mother of two boys under 10, had developed a rare apple-sized growth on the roof of her mouth. She couldn’t eat, had lost more than 40 pounds and could not receive the treatment she needed from local doctors. ”The first thing I thought about was my children, that I wouldn’t see them grow up. Who was going to take care of them?” said Franco-Rosero through translator Galo Burbano, a certified registered nurse anesthetist at John T. Mather Memorial Hospital in Port Jefferson. “

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