MOCA.- When 70-year-old Olimpia Veras Diaz called out to Miguel Angel Almanzar for money on the streets of Moca, God was in the process of answering her prayers.

Almanzar didn’t have any money, but he could offer something better: a free medical consultation at the Sol Naciente Foundation’s new community centre in Moca, where he volunteers every day between 2:00 and 5:00.

Now, seated on a bed in one of the centre’s consulting rooms, Olimpia asks Almanzar if he’s married while he takes a reading of her blood glucose levels to test her for diabetes. She herself never married, she explains, and now lives “alone, with God and Mary,” in a campo outside Moca. When she was younger, she says, she took odd jobs, like cooking and selling clothing on the street. Now, she walks the seven kilometres into the city every day to beg.

She extends her left leg to Almanzar; an open sore on her ankle has been causing her immense pain for eleven months, and her foot is swollen and discoloured. Her blood sugar is normal, he tells her, but it looks like she could have a problem with her circulation. He gives her a free antibiotic cream for the sore and tells her to come back in ten days.

Olimpia may be back on the streets, but at least where her health is concerned, she has a safe place to return to.

“We have medicine around the world … and in Dominican Republic there is money enough to attend to [the poor], but they don’t get the real attention they need,” Almanzar says after Olimpia’s gone.

That’s why he volunteers at the centre in addition to practicing general medicine at a private clinic in Salcedo. He only gets 50 percent of the 100-peso consultation fee paid by those who can afford it (the other half goes to the Foundation), and frequently waives the fee altogether for people like Olimpia, but it’s enough for him “just to help the poor people of Moca city.”

“So many people need so much help,” explains Dr. Ramon Lopez, Sol Naciente’s founder. In 1995, Lopez was living in New York City and sitting on the boards of various community groups that provided assistance to Dominican immigrants when he started “feeling the need to have an institution that worked for the well-being of Dominicans, not just in New York but on the island,” he says.

In 1996, he began coordinating medical missions to Villa Mella in north Santo Domingo, at that time the poorest urban municipality in the country. That led to partnerships with other NGOs like Physicians for Peace, as well as exchange programs with the College of William and Mary in Virginia and Taiwanese doctors.

Lopez’s background in social health led him to develop four pillars for Sol Naciente based on a goal of total well-being for its patients: physical health, education, environmental health and human rights. All are connected, he says. “When you get a better education, you know more about your own rights, you take more responsibility for your health.”

Currently, Sol Naciente is lobbying local government in Moca to reduce noise pollution on the city streets and test the river for chemical contamination, working with another local foundation that provides cleft palate and other facial surgeries to impoverished patients free of charge, and preparing to install a dental clinic in their new centre with equipment donated by Physicians for Peace. Eventually, Lopez hopes to run educational programming in the centre’s multi-use room, and open up a drop-in day camp for poor children – all his way of “trying to give back to the town where I was raised.”

Olimpia Diaz is one of just five patients Almanzar sees during his shift that day – an average day for the centre, which opened seven months ago. He says he has time to see between 20 and 30 people during his hours, but that the most he’s ever had in a day is 10, because not many people know the centre exists and offers discounted or free medical consultations.

Still, he says, “We think within one year we will be full of patients, because it’s a great service … I could stay later, and call my doctor friends to help. I have other work to sustain me, but to help is always my first priority.”