By Callum Ludwig
A local Rotarian is helping drive an organisation-wide initiative to provide urgent medical care to children in need.
The Rotary Club of Wandin’s Gavan McIntyre also holds the position of ROMAC (Rotary Oceania Medical Aid for Children) District Chair of District 9815, ably supported by his wife Di, helping coordinate for children in neighbouring countries in Oceania to come to Melbourne for crucial medical procedures.
Mr McIntyre said he and the Rotary Club of Wandin have been involved in ROMAC for about 10 years.
“The club got involved in hosting a boy from Vanuatu 10 years ago, he had broken his leg when he was about five years old and came out here when he was about 13 or 14 to have his leg repaired because it had basically grown at right angles because it had never been set properly,” he said.
“Rotary found him in his village, he couldn’t walk, so we brought him out here, Wandin hosted him for a couple of months, he and his mum lived here and he had his operations, all done at Epworth in Richmond,”
“He went home a happy and healthy teenager, he could run around and kick a football all before he even went back home.”
Started over 35 years ago, ROMAC has provided life-altering surgeries for over 500 children in more than 20 countries, entirely from the efforts and fundraising of volunteers in Rotary.
Mr McIntyre said a lot of these kids just don’t have the opportunity to have their conditions fixed and become a burden to their family and village forever.
“One of our most recent patients had a club foot, the kid couldn’t walk but he came here and has gone home walking normally, which is heartwarming,” he said
“But another big problem with these kids and parents from these countries, a lot of them don’t have birth certificates, they don’t have any paperwork, so when it comes to wanting to leave a country, they need to get a passport, a visa and it can take a hell of a long time because a lot of them live remotely and have got no way of getting into the main towns to do the paperwork, they don’t know how to do it,”
“It can take 12 months to get the paperwork, and we have lost kids. You know, we’ve had the kids die before we can work together to bring them to the country which really sad but that’s just the way it is.”
To help prevent those circumstances, as well as Rotarians in Australia and New Zealand ready to support children and their families upon arrival, ROMAC has people in the nations it serves who ‘help with passport and visa applications, finding and communicating with our potential patients, organising medical checks and ensuring they are on time to board their plane.’
Mr McIntyre said you don’t have to be a part of a Rotary Club to support ROMAC.
I don’t need to be part of the Rotary Club, they can donate to Ramy and I think in the Committee “You can donate to Rotary or straight to ROMAC on the website, all donations are tax-deductible and all the money is used, there’s nobody getting paid anywhere in ROMAC and the surgeons are really good too, they do it pro bono most of the time,” he said.
“It’s mainly the hospitals we’ve got to pay for, the use of operating theatres where some of these operations might go for five or six hours and we’ve got to pay for all the dressings and all the stuff they use, and sometimes we have to pay for half a dozen scans before they work out what they are going to do,”
“We can volunteer to take these kids on and we’ve done it, you take them into the Children’s Hospital and it might be for scans three or four days in a row, then you take them in for their operation and they might be in for a few days or a few weeks depending on what they’re getting done and it’s a commitment, but it’s a pretty rewarding commitment.”
To find out more, read patient stories or donate, visit: romac.org.au.
