Decades Of Caring Denver Couple Dedicate Their Lives To Ease Suffering In Third World Countries

The call came at 7:20 a.m. Marty Downey remembers that morning last August exactly.

She sleepily answered the phone and was electrified by the request: Could she organize a medical team to leave for Rwanda?

By the day’s end, she had an experienced seven-member team of doctors and nurses packing their bags.

AmeriCares, a relief organization in Connecticut, contacted Marty because she is an old African hand. Thirty-one years ago she and her husband, Hugh, founded Lalmba Association, a non-profit organization that operates medical clinics in Sudan, Kenya and Eritrea and an orphanage in Mexico.

The experience necessary to meet AmeriCares’ request successfully did not come easily or quickly for Marty, who grew up in a middle-class home in Kansas City, Mo.

Recalling her first encounter with the reality of the Third World, she said, “I nearly barfed right then and there.” She was on her honeymoon.

She married Hugh, her childhood sweetheart, directly after college. He had been in the Army stationed in Eritrea, where he established a home for 13 street boys.

He took his bride to the place he loved.

“Hugh showed me color slides of Eritrea, which looked pretty,” Marty recalled with a rueful laugh. “But the pictures didn’t prepare me for the dirt and flies and smells. I had never experienced anything like that before.

“The combination of those things made me ill.

“I cried a lot at first. I was in culture shock. I had never experienced poverty and dirt like that. I really didn’t want anything to do with it.

“Whenever Hugh left, I would cry. I didn’t want him to know how unhappy I was because he was so excited.”

In Keren, a town of 25,000 in the hot lowlands, Marty and Hugh found a house at the end of the electricity line.

“Sometimes the lights worked and sometimes they didn’t,” Marty recalled. “At night, hyenas walked around our house.”

Trained as an elementary-school teacher, she taught as a substitute at the public school. Still, she felt disconnected to the place.

That changed when she took charge of creating Keren’s first municipal library. The town gave her and Hugh a house for the thousands of books they had shipped over.

Her job was to create order out of the chaos. She started to feel at home.

She became involved with the children at Hugh’s orphanage.

“I let myself fall in love with the boys,” she said. “The first day I walked into the orphanage and saw the kids sitting on the floor eating with their hands food that looked and smelled bad, my stomach did flip-flops.

“Then I learned that was their traditional way of eating and that the food was good. Eventually I learned to prepare the local dishes I had found so repulsive.”

She was hooked. An initial three-year commitment to live in Eritrea has stretched into a lifetime of work.

“As soon as we saw a need, we worked toward the goal of meeting it,” Marty said. “We expanded as we went along.”

One of their biggest goals was to build a hospital in Keren. After five years of scraping together small donations, they built a 75-bed hospital.

Their orphanage expanded to accommodate 100 boys. They built an obstetrics clinic and 10 village schools.

A mass wounding of women and children caught in the crossfire of a civil war - and herself being shot - propelled her into a career change from teaching to nursing.

The fulcrum for this change was the civil war between the government of Emperor Haile Selassie and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, which won Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia in 1990 after a 30-year guerrilla war.

In 1964, the Ethiopian army attacked a village a mile from the Downeys’ house in Keren. More than 200 women and children, their limbs shredded or blown off, flooded Keren’s hospital, which had been built only four months before through the Downeys’ fund-raising efforts in the United States.

“That is when I got into general anesthesia with no previous experience,” Marty said. “There wasn’t anyone to give the wounded general pain relief.

“I used a peace pipe, a little plastic tube with cotton soaked with penthrane. That would knock them out while we amputated the arms and legs.”

Her interest in learning medicine accelerated after she was machine-gunned.

One night in Keren, she and Hugh drove to meet friends. As they passed the governor’s house, one of the guards, nervous about rebels in the neighborhood, opened fire without warning.

A bullet penetrated the vehicle, hitting Marty next to her kneecap and slicing her leg. It went through both of Hugh’s pants legs and left a 6-inch diameter hole in his door.

There was no serious bleeding, so they bandaged her wound and went to play pinochle with their friends.

“Hugh and I lost all night,” she recalled. “It was that kind of night.”

Marty had learned on her own in Eritrea to deliver babies, set fractures and suture wounds, but she wanted to learn the right way to practice medicine. After the Downeys moved to Golden, Colo., in 1974, she enrolled in nursing school.

They commuted to Eritrea every three months in their continuing work with the Lalmba Association, named for a word meaning “place of hope” in Tigrennia, an Eritrean dialect.

In July 1977, all their properties in Eritrea were taken over first by the rebels, then by the Ethiopian government. Undaunted, they started from scratch across the border in Sudan.

Their Abuda settlement remains the home of 5,000 refugees from the Eritrean war.

The Downeys also founded Mission Corps International, an organization that sends children in the Denver area to Mexico on summer work programs. And they started a home for homeless children in Tenancingo, a small town two hours southwest of Mexico City.

Marty and Hugh are Lalmba’s only permanent employees. And they are not paid.

Lalmba, with an annual $300,000 budget, survives on volunteer help and “those $5-a-month donations,” Marty said.

In her other life, Marty, 50, is a registered nurse at Denver’s Lutheran Medical Center. Hugh, the visionary behind Lalmba, alternates annually with Marty as president of Lalmba.

“Hugh and I always had a dream to be of service to the poor,” Marty said. “We thought we had something to offer them, especially I did with my college education. I thought I was pretty smart.

“But it didn’t take long for me to realize that those people had more to teach me than I did them.

“They taught me basic values.

“I knew the difference between right and wrong, but I hadn’t seen anybody really suffer. I hadn’t seen poverty so rampant until I got to Eritrea. People were just eking out the basic necessities, like where their food or clean water were coming from every day.

“But they shared even the handful of grain they had. And that was during the great famine that ravaged Ethiopia.

“Both Hugh and I experienced a very deep spirituality there, a spirituality in action. The people showed us a real elemental caring for each other as humans.”