It Ain't Over (40 page)

“Every now and then, I think back to that day the tech bubble burst and took my job with it. Out of the lowest point in my life came something that is truly my own. Like Tom Peters advised, I found that underserved niche that very few were doing and I’m doing it well.”

“To find your passion, you have to show up. You have to look around and see what needs doing, and just do it.”

Nancy Sanford Hughes, 71

Eugene, Oregon

T
he request sounded reasonable enough: “Could you please delay dinner?”

The 120 doctors, nurses, and support staff assembled in the dining hall looked up, curious to hear what the young Guatemalan woman with the striking dark eyes had to say. She began to speak.

“My name is Irma, and at the age of two, I fell into an open fire and burned my hands shut,” she began, a translator changing her native Kechiquel words into English. For 16 years, she said, she hadn’t been able to gather wood or cook, leaving her with little hope of ever attracting a husband. Now one of the team’s plastic surgeons had repaired her hands, separating her fused fingers. For the first time ever, she could make tortillas. She could marry. She could start a family. “Thank you,” she said. “You are my miracle.”

No one spoke. “We were all weeping,” says Nancy Sanford Hughes, a volunteer who was cooking dinner for the medical team. “It was so profound. She had suffered for so long.”

On her three mission trips to the Central American country, including this one in 2004, Nancy had witnessed the medical team do so much good—restoring a 14-year-old boy’s eyesight, excising a man’s grapefruit-sized tumor, removing the ruptured appendix of a woman whose brother had carried her, strapped to a chair, for four days in order to reach the clinic. But this team had only ten days in the country, and when it was time for the doctors to go back to the United States, there were still a thousand people waiting in line. Sometimes at the end of a mission trip, another volunteer medical corps was on its way, sometimes not. “It’s appalling,” Nancy says. “There’s basically no medical care for the indigenous people, and there’s a desperate need.”

But Irma’s story moved Nancy on a whole different level. The most dangerous activity for a woman in that part of the developing world was cooking for her family, often with a baby strapped to her back, leaning over an open campfire in a tiny, unventilated home. She had watched mothers and children come into the clinic with chronic coughs, debilitating burns, and hernias caused by having to lug heavy bundles of wood. “There were medical teams who couldn’t insert tubes down babies’ throats because they were so choked with creosote,” she says. There must be something she could do for these families, she thought.

Helping others had been a big part of the very full life she had led back home in Oregon. She and her husband, George, known to everyone as Duffy, had three kids—a son and two daughters. But you’d never know it from looking around their dinner table most nights. You might see an exchange student from China or Finland (Nancy has hosted more than 50 in all), a couple of neighbors, Duffy’s brother and his four kids, or maybe a few of their son’s rowing buddies, fresh from a workout in the basement, where they’d set up their team training room. “I was always cooking for a mob,” she says. “Our house was a busy place, and that’s putting it mildly.”

Nancy welcomed the chaos. She’d always been the type who couldn’t sit
still for long. While Duffy was building his family medicine practice, she volunteered for everything under the sun—“the library, the symphony, the theater, my kids’ schools,” she says. “You name it, I did it.”

Then, in 1993, a shock: Duffy was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 51. “I’d get mad when I saw those pink ribbons and say, ‘Men get this disease, too, you know!’ ” Nancy says. But she tried to stay upbeat. “Lots of people get breast cancer and lots of people do fine afterward,” she told herself. Duffy was less optimistic. “From the very beginning, he looked at me and said, ‘I always knew something odd would kill me.’ ” His doctors removed the tumor, assuring them the cancer was slow-growing and further treatment wasn’t needed at that point. “Things went along fairly normally after that,” she says.

But about four years later, when Duffy could barely lean over to put on his shoes, Nancy insisted that he go back in to be checked.

“Duffy was a doctor, so his idea of going to the doctor was running into one of his partners in the hall and saying, ‘Hey, I don’t feel so hot,’ ” Nancy says. “He would never make an appointment to actually go in and be examined.” Sure enough, by the time he did, the cancer had spread to his spine.

It was a staggering setback, but Nancy was not about to give up on him. She’d fallen in love with this strong, vibrant man because he had a spirit of adventure that matched her own. “That bound us together,” she says. This would be their next adventure—albeit a scary one.

Over the next four years, she went to all of his oncology appointments, a thick binder in hand. “I took notes, wrote down all the medicines he was on, and reminded the doctors of what they had said before,” Nancy says. Together, they decided he should try an experimental treatment. She and their kids, who were now young adults, hung on to the 40 percent chance that it might extend his life.

But the cancer would not relent. Duffy’s athletic body weakened and he went into his office less and less. “Not only did he lose his identity as Dr. Hughes,
he also stopped being a swimmer, a runner, and a skier,” Nancy says. “Having to give all that up was devastating for him. I had to figure out what to do next, support him emotionally, help my kids with what they were going through and sort of pretend that life was normal. It was mentally exhausting.”

She was physically tired as well. If Duffy couldn’t sleep at night, Nancy sat up with him. Near the end, he could no longer swallow and she’d lie awake listening to the hum of the machine that pumped food into him. When he died in the spring of 2001, “it was almost a relief,” Nancy says. “As strange as that sounds, when you’ve been living with someone with a life-threatening illness for eight years, it’s true.” By the time he died, “I had already gone through a lot of mourning. It’s the gift of having advance notice, of knowing what’s coming.”

But once she took care of the obvious—things like meeting with the lawyers to settle his estate and thanking all their friends who had brought meals—reality set in: She was a widow at age 58. What would life be like without Duffy in it?

“I had to figure out what to do next,” she says. “Once I lost Duffy—and with my kids gone, too—I had to change direction.”

That new direction came in 2002, when her son’s girlfriend told her she was headed to Playa Grande, Guatemala, with a medical team sponsored by Helps International, a nonprofit that fights poverty in Latin America. Nancy had always wanted to go on this kind of mission, but assumed she was unqualified because she was neither a doctor nor a nurse. “When I signed up, they said, ‘What can you do?’ And I answered, ‘I guess I can cook.’ ”

From the very first day of that first trip, Nancy’s “mom skills” kicked in. After flying into Guatemala City, then taking a 15-hour bus ride to an abandoned military base on the northern border, she and the team were famished. “So we made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—for 125 people!”

That night, she set up her sleeping cot in the kitchen, next to the
pilla,
a laundry tub with a pinhole-sized drain where she and her coworkers had to
scrub all the pots and pans. They boiled any water they needed to purify it and depended on dull knives and a single handheld can opener to cook three meals a day for the medical staff—plus any snacks if they got hungry while tending to patients around the clock.

“We worked from the minute we woke up until late, late at night,” Nancy says. When she had a free moment, she’d wander into the clinic where the doctors and nurses allowed her a bedside view of their work. “It was fascinating,” she says. “I just wanted to help out in any way I could.” So she came back to work the kitchen year after year.

But after her third trip, in 2004, Nancy wanted to do more than cook. “I started talking about what I had seen to whoever would listen,” she says. “Every time I mentioned Irma, I broke down.”

She had heard about organizations that provided fuel-efficient stoves in developing countries, so she wrote her very first grant through her local Rotary Club, where Duffy had been a longtime member. When his college roommates wanted to plant trees in his honor, she steered them instead to her stove project.

“We have enough trees in Oregon,” she told them. “I will make much better use of your money.” In all, she received funding to buy 100 stoves. “This was my memorial to Duffy,” she says.

A year later, Nancy returned to Guatemala, this time to head up a six-person stove team. For ten days, they hiked through fields of corn and up and down the slopes of volcanoes—following directions like “turn left at the banana tree, go until you see the pig and it will be on your right”—to reach the homes that Helps International had selected for the stoves.

As she and her team learned to use rivet guns and screwdrivers to assemble the heavy cement pieces, they also learned that smiles, handshakes, and hugs overcome any language barriers.

“The indigenous people are welcoming, friendly, honorable, lovely people
with a wonderful sense of family,” Nancy says. “You can go into the poorest home and they will offer you something to drink.”

Nancy led several more trips, installing more than 100 stoves at a time, but she began to feel deflated. The stoves had downsides: They couldn’t be put in homes with thatch roofs, they were extremely heavy to carry in the mountainous terrain, and they weren’t portable, so women were still stuck inside all day cooking. Plus, when she learned that Guatemala alone needed approximately 6 million stoves, “it was overwhelming. What I was doing seemed ridiculous because it was so small in comparison to the need,” she says.

Should she just give up? One of the engineers who helped design the stoves wouldn’t hear of it. He dropped by Nancy’s house one day to give her a copy of the book
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
—along with a pep talk.

“You can’t stop,” he told her. “You’re very effective at what you’re doing. Just keep going.” Soon after, she got a call from another stove designer, who said he could create a better stove, one that was portable and didn’t need a chimney.

Then about a month later, she opened her mailbox and found a letter from Carlos and Deborah Santana’s Milagro Foundation with a check for $10,000. By sheer luck, the sister of the foundation’s administrator had seen an article about Nancy in a local medical society newsletter. “It was like a perfect storm of goodness,” Nancy says. She had to keep forging ahead.

Since then, Nancy has launched StoveTeam International, which has helped raise nearly $1.2 million so that entrepreneurs could open eight factories in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Called the Ecocina, the innovative new stove produces almost no smoke, uses less than half the wood of an open fire, and reduces carbon emissions and particulate matter by more than 70 percent. Even with manufacturing and labor costs, the factories have kept the price of the stove to just $50 or $60. To date, more than 38,000 stoves have been provided to families.

In 2011, Nancy received a $100,000 Purpose Prize, given to social
entrepreneurs over 60 who are working to improve society. And two years later, the White House honored her as a Rotary Champion of Change.

Now 71 and a grandmother of two, Nancy still sees much to be done. She has started a project to lower the costs of the stoves by helping the factory owners receive carbon credits, and she spearheaded a program to open distribution centers to make the stoves available to more people.

As for Irma, she came back to visit the medical team two years after she’d first thanked them. This time, in her beautiful hands she held a baby. If Nancy has her way, dangerous cooking fumes or flames will be something Irma’s child will never know.

“People say, ‘You have such a passion,’ but I didn’t start with a passion. I just showed up on the medical team. To find your passion, you have to show up. You have to look around and see what needs doing, and just do it.”

Vicki Sokolik, 52

Tampa, Florida

I
n 2000, Vicki Sokolik was standing in the vegetable section of her Tampa grocery store when a fellow mom came up to say hello.

“I’ve had the worst morning!” the woman lamented, describing how her daughter had thrown a tantrum over a hair bow.

Vicki smiled blankly and gritted her teeth. Oh, what she would have given to have a hair-bow problem. Just the day before, Vicki had returned from a Houston hospital, where she had spent more than three months waiting for doctors to perform surgery on her 11-year-old daughter, Cori, who suffered from a rare form of severe epilepsy.

Now back home, everything and everyone felt surreal.