Cheyenne
Ms. Smarty Pantsless
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2000
- Posts
- 59,554
I thought this was a great story for today- how much richer is our country because the people like Dr. Gonzalez come here for a better life? The American Dream lives.
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http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/jul02/56490.asp
Ramon Gonzalez, a family physician who founded the Madre Angela Family Medical Center on Chavez Drive in 1983 - and has since treated 20,912 patients, regardless of their ability to pay - asks me to follow him.
We go into a darkened room beside his office. Gonzalez is wearing a blue lab coat with an American flag pinned to its lapel. He is devoutly Republican - a toy elephant is prominently displayed near his desk - and I tell him the one about the transplant patient who has a choice between a heart belonging to a 20-year-old athlete and one belonging to an 87-year-old Republican; the patient says he'll take the Republican heart because it's never been used.
Gonzalez flips on a panel of lights. The lights are normally used for reading X-rays, but on this occasion, he is using them to illuminate a framed but yellowing newspaper clipping dated Aug. 31, 1960. It is from a Dominican paper, La Nacion.
The lead picture is that of a blown-apart building, and beside it, a headline, with columns and columns of copy below.
"That," he says, "is my old clinic. Can you read Spanish?"
He runs his fingers over the headline and translates: "Rapid Action by Police Avoids Lynching."
He laughs.
"The police. It was the police that looted my clinic and destroyed it."
That was during the reign of American-supported dictator Rafael Trujillo, who took control of the Dominican Republic in 1930 and ruled until his (probably American-supported) assassination in 1961.
Gonzalez believes his clinic was attacked because he had formed a party in opposition to Trujillo and had written Trujillo demanding better medical facilities for the poor, which in the Dominican Republic was just about everyone not related to, or in cahoots with, Trujillo.
When his clinic was attacked, Gonzalez jumped from a second-floor window onto the roof of a neighboring house. He then fled the country, eventually settling in New York. Here's how Gonzalez launched his American medical career:
He went through the employment ads. The only ad in Spanish was for a window washer on a New York skyscraper. Gonzalez applied. A man asked him what he knew about window washing. "Nothing," Gonzalez told him. "I'm a medical doctor." The man sent Gonzalez to Harlem Hospital, where he found a job in obstetrics/gynecology.
So began his journey to earning his American medical certification and to his practice in Milwaukee.
Along the way was a stop in Chicago, where a young nursing assistant came into his examining room to fill up his water pitcher. There was a mirror in the room, and as the woman replenished the doctor's water supply, she kept an eye on the doctor.
"Nurse," he said. The woman turned. Gonzalez couldn't think of anything memorable to say, but when the woman left the room, Gonzalez, 40 years later, remembers telling his patient: "Wow. That is a beautiful woman."
The two married in 1967, added three more children to the six the doctor had produced in a previous marriage, and, in 1976, Rita and Ramon Gonzalez settled in Milwaukee, where, Ramon Gonzalez says, he was then one of but two Hispanic physicians.
"Come, come," Gonzalez says, and he takes me into an examining room. There are boxes of clothes on the floor, and there are suits and dresses hanging on the door.
"They are for the patients," he says. "If they need clothes, they are here. If they are hungry, we find them food. That is our mission: to serve the poor.
"This is why I am 76 and still working," he says. "Working with poor people, you can never retire. There is no finishing the job. Poverty continues."
Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on July 4, 2002.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/jul02/56490.asp
Ramon Gonzalez, a family physician who founded the Madre Angela Family Medical Center on Chavez Drive in 1983 - and has since treated 20,912 patients, regardless of their ability to pay - asks me to follow him.
We go into a darkened room beside his office. Gonzalez is wearing a blue lab coat with an American flag pinned to its lapel. He is devoutly Republican - a toy elephant is prominently displayed near his desk - and I tell him the one about the transplant patient who has a choice between a heart belonging to a 20-year-old athlete and one belonging to an 87-year-old Republican; the patient says he'll take the Republican heart because it's never been used.
Gonzalez flips on a panel of lights. The lights are normally used for reading X-rays, but on this occasion, he is using them to illuminate a framed but yellowing newspaper clipping dated Aug. 31, 1960. It is from a Dominican paper, La Nacion.
The lead picture is that of a blown-apart building, and beside it, a headline, with columns and columns of copy below.
"That," he says, "is my old clinic. Can you read Spanish?"
He runs his fingers over the headline and translates: "Rapid Action by Police Avoids Lynching."
He laughs.
"The police. It was the police that looted my clinic and destroyed it."
That was during the reign of American-supported dictator Rafael Trujillo, who took control of the Dominican Republic in 1930 and ruled until his (probably American-supported) assassination in 1961.
Gonzalez believes his clinic was attacked because he had formed a party in opposition to Trujillo and had written Trujillo demanding better medical facilities for the poor, which in the Dominican Republic was just about everyone not related to, or in cahoots with, Trujillo.
When his clinic was attacked, Gonzalez jumped from a second-floor window onto the roof of a neighboring house. He then fled the country, eventually settling in New York. Here's how Gonzalez launched his American medical career:
He went through the employment ads. The only ad in Spanish was for a window washer on a New York skyscraper. Gonzalez applied. A man asked him what he knew about window washing. "Nothing," Gonzalez told him. "I'm a medical doctor." The man sent Gonzalez to Harlem Hospital, where he found a job in obstetrics/gynecology.
So began his journey to earning his American medical certification and to his practice in Milwaukee.
Along the way was a stop in Chicago, where a young nursing assistant came into his examining room to fill up his water pitcher. There was a mirror in the room, and as the woman replenished the doctor's water supply, she kept an eye on the doctor.
"Nurse," he said. The woman turned. Gonzalez couldn't think of anything memorable to say, but when the woman left the room, Gonzalez, 40 years later, remembers telling his patient: "Wow. That is a beautiful woman."
The two married in 1967, added three more children to the six the doctor had produced in a previous marriage, and, in 1976, Rita and Ramon Gonzalez settled in Milwaukee, where, Ramon Gonzalez says, he was then one of but two Hispanic physicians.
"Come, come," Gonzalez says, and he takes me into an examining room. There are boxes of clothes on the floor, and there are suits and dresses hanging on the door.
"They are for the patients," he says. "If they need clothes, they are here. If they are hungry, we find them food. That is our mission: to serve the poor.
"This is why I am 76 and still working," he says. "Working with poor people, you can never retire. There is no finishing the job. Poverty continues."
Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on July 4, 2002.
I'll turn you into a Republican yet, riff. 
