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Artist Helps His Homeland

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By NICOLA M. WHITE, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 19, 2007

HOLIDAY - Sometimes, the water shuts off in the middle of the day. The doctors wash their hands in buckets.

Instead of throwing away their paper gowns and surgical masks, the doctors sterilize and reuse them.

Those are the hospital conditions in Vahak Sarkis' familial homeland of Armenia. Such glaring need is why he helps organize an initiative every two years that sends American medical professionals to the tiny, landlocked Eastern European country to provide spinal surgery to children.

The children, who are between 6 and 18, suffer from idiopathic or congenital scoliosis, which make a person's spine curved instead of straight. Advanced scoliosis makes walking and sitting painful.

The surgeries also help children who have been different their entire lives fit in.

"When they come in so sad and suddenly they realize they can stand up straight - the smile on their face!" said Sarkis, 73, with a hearty laugh.

The six-hour surgeries are very complex. One errant move of the scalpel could paralyze a person for life, so the skills and equipment the Americans bring are invaluable.

"They have great pride over there and good medical staff. They just don't have a lot of the spine surgery experience over there," said Ken Guidera, chief of staff at Shriners Hospitals for Children in Minneapolis, who heads up the medical team.
Guidera performs about 10 surgeries during each trip while training his Armenian counterparts in the latest spinal surgery techniques.

He and Sarkis, a retired chemistry professor from Holiday, hooked up in 1988 when a group of children was sent to Shriners Hospitals for Children in Tampa, where Guidera was working as a surgeon, after a massive earthquake killed 45,000 people in Armenia. Sarkis, also a well-known sculptor, volunteered to translate.

Years later, one of the Armenian doctors returned to Shriners for a lecture. At the end, he asked whether there were any spinal surgeons in the audience and said he needed their help.
Guidera signed up.

Since then, Sarkis and Guidera have sent medical teams to Armenia three times. A fourth visit is planned in April.

The staff has expanded to include a facial plastic surgeon, Raffi Dersarkissian, Sarkis' nephew. He works on boosting children's self-esteem by fixing their cleft lips and other facial problems.

Sarkis is the project's one-man fundraising machine. Although Sarkis, the doctors and nurses pay their own airfare and Armenian hospital officials arrange for housing, Sarkis must raise about $10,000 for each trip to help send surgical technicians and to ship the equipment. The money comes from private donations, mostly from Sarkis' friends and family.

Roots To The Homeland

To understand why Sarkis feels so strongly about helping Armenian children, you just have to listen to his life story.

It actually doesn't start in Armenia.

In fact, until he lectured at Yerevan State University in 1973, Sarkis had never set foot in the country of his ancestors.

But while growing up in Egypt, though, Sarkis carried the painful history - and pride - of Armenia in his heart. No matter what, his parents taught him, Armenia was his homeland.

"We were all told from childhood, the love of freedom of our country," he said.

Sarkis grew up hearing tales about how the Turks imprisoned his father in the early 1920s. He escaped a death sentence only because he could read and write Turkish fluently and was asked to keep the prison's records.

He listened to his mother's stories about hiding in 1922 while soldiers killed her pregnant niece and then fleeing to Greece, to Lebanon, to Israel.

Sarkis' parents eventually settled in Cairo, where there was a large Armenian community. In 1934, his father opened a shoe factory, which became successful. After the monarchy was overthrown in the early 1950s, the government nationalized the factories. In 1961, Sarkis' father had to give up his shoe factory, and the family lost everything.

Sense Of Duty

By that time, Sarkis already was in the United States to complete his studies in chemistry. His parents soon followed. He took a job as a professor at the State University of New York at Albany.

His parents kept telling stories about Armenia.

When the communist government invited him to the capital city to lecture, Sarkis felt proud but conflicted. Although Armenia wouldn't become a free country until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, on the streets of Yerevan in 1973, "I heard rebellion," Sarkis said.

There Sarkis learned the strength of the Armenian people while they lived under dictators. Although communism technically made everyone equal, there was rampant corruption and inequities between those with money and those with none.

Almost two decades after communism ended, Armenia is still a poor country. Though its doctors are smart, they lack proper supplies and adequate pay.

"They work for peanuts," Sarkis said.

As a successful Armenian expatriate, Sarkis feels a duty to give back to the country for which his parents sacrificed so much; neither was alive to see the collapse of the communism.

"Anything I can do, in terms of trying to be of help, it's my personal desire."

For information about the project, call Sarkis at (727) 939-0456.

Reporter Nicola M. White can be reached at (813) 779-4613 or nwhite1@tampatrib.com.

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