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Home>Service> Awardees of Fervent Global Love of Lives Award> 19th Fervent Global Love of Lives Award 2016> Nicaragua Sunshine Guarding Angel – Vivian Pellas
Nicaragua Sunshine Guarding Angel – Vivian Pellas
[Return to Survival from Near Death · Create Burn Hospital]
“People’s lives can indeed be changed in the blink of an eye. But what matters is what people choose to do about it afterwards.”
– Vivian Pellas
 
        Born in 1954 in Havana, capital of Cuba, Vivian Pellas emigrated to Nicaragua with her parents when she was 7 years old. Since childhood, she wished to dance and help others, and often prayed to God that she could realize these two wishes. At the age of 22, she married a Nicaraguan entrepreneur Carlos Pellas and they had three children after marriage. Therefore, families and dance became the top priority of her life. Young Vivian was exceedingly grateful, since God appeared to have helped her fulfill her wishes.
        Nonetheless, an accident on October 21, 1989 changed her life. At the age of 35 and on the way to take a landing at the Honduras Airport with her husband, the plane, owing to human error, crashed into the steep cliff at the speed of 800 km/h. As a result, 148 people on board were killed and only 14 passengers including the Pellas couple survived the crash. Vivian suffered 62 wounds, and her face and arms were almost melted by the fire. She received 28 reconstruction surgeries, skin grafts and rehabilitation. Besides, her husband was severely burned and lost 4 fingers. Back then, she felt she plunged into hell, as if she was brutally tortured by the raging fire. Yet, after surviving from near death, Vivian was not crushed. Instead, she accepted the God’s infinite mercy and grace to her, and since then, she has committed herself to helping the impoverished and helpless Nicaraguans.
        In 1991, 37-year-old Vivian created The Association for Child Burn Victims in Nicaragua (APROQUEN), the first center in Central America that committed to child burns, congenital malformations and acquired cleft lip reconstruction and offered free and comprehensive medical care for children and adolescents under 18.
        Therefore, Vivian, with her faith in God, gets over the difficult moments and turns her own pain into others’ hope. Besides, she opens a new chapter for health care in Nicaragua, sheds light on the burned patients in Latin America, and motivates Latin American countries to create burns units – benefiting thousands of burn patients. Hence, she deserves to be the “Sunshine Guarding Angel”. Among the 2459 nominees for the medal, Vivian Pellas has been awarded the 19th Global Fervent Love of Lives Medal by the Chou Ta-kuan Foundation.
 
Near-death Experiences · Birth of Hospitals
        On October 21, 1989, a Boeing 727 airliner of Aero Honduras crushed into the mountains before landing at the Honduras airport since the pilots misjudged mountainous terrain. Then, the aircraft exploded. Only 14 passengers on board survived, and the remaining 148 passengers died on the spot. This is the worst air disaster in the history of Central America. When surviving Vivian recalled the flight accident, like most people with near-death experience, she seemed to see a light. She was awakened by her husband from a comma. Although she almost lost control of her limbs, she still strove to escape the cabin with Carlos and other passengers. Then, they saw the plane explode into a fireball, and were shocked flying to roadside. Vivian suffered 62 wounds, and her face and arms were almost melted by the fire. Back then, she was unconscious, and her husband severely burned and lost 4 fingers.
        Vivian says she remembers the next moments with nightmarish detachment, unable to distinguish what was real and what was imagined.
        “I just remember looking at my feet and I saw a very clear light. Then I closed my eyes and I felt like I was going down a dark tunnel. What I didn’t realize was I was rolling around outside of the plane. When I got up, I remember seeing a rainbow. I don’t know if it was a hallucination or if it was true and I thought of my children. Then I saw my fingernails touching the ground, with my skin hanging off. Then I started to run.” Later, the couple were immediately sent by a kind-hearted truck driver to a hospital in the Honduran capital.
        Upon arrival at the hospital, Carlos asked the driver to call her parents – who had been waiting for their daughter and son-in-law at the airport. By the time Vivian’s father arrived at the hospital, he had to fight his way through a throng of doctors gathering around his daughter’s bed. She was barely conscious when he made it to her bedside.
        “My dad said I was still moving my mouth, so he got closer to me and I was repeating: I am going to build a hospital for burned children. I am going to build a hospital for burned children.”  
 
Enthusiastic Support for Vulnerable Burned Patients in Latin America
       Although she survived the crush, Vivian’s injuries were too severe to treat at the local hospitals in Nicaragua. During the treatment and rehabilitation, she was constantly transferred to hospitals in several countries and found doctors with consummate medical skills. Finally, she was transported to the U.S. Mercy Hospital. The road to recover from severe injuries is painful and long. With 62 fractures and burns all over her body, Vivian was transported between five different hospitals for surgeries, enduring long, bumpy car rides up hilly mountain roads.
        Once she finally recovered, Vivian started to give a hand to other burn victims and was inspired to make the process smoother for them. While burns do not tend to be a problem in high-income countries, they are a serious health concern in many low- and middle-income countries, according to her. The information of WHO shows that Nicaragua is one of the countries where people are widely tortured by burns. The WHO estimates that nearly 200,000 people worldwide perish in fires each year, while about 70,000 more die of other types of burns.
        Vivian knew, however, that few Nicaraguans would be able to afford the many surgeries, rehabilitative care and psychological treatment that are typically required to fully recover from such injuries. So with her own experience in mind, Vivian worked to create a state-of-the-art burn center where all medical technology and services would be free.
        “I promised God that because my husband and I were the ones who got burned but survived the plant crash, I was going to do it for unprivileged children free of charge,” Vivian says.  
 
Build Burn Center · Offer Free Healthcare
        Two years after the air crash, Vivian established APROQUEN in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Staffed with a wide range of professionals from garment designers of burn-covering sleeves to rehab therapists helping patients regain motor skills, APROQUEN provides additional health services to children beyond burn treatment, such as cleft lip and palate repairs.
        “I was the patient, so I see the other side of the coin. Burns are a forgotten cause. We can be a voice for the burn victims of the world”, she says.  
        The physical pain goes away, but the scars don’t. And the emotional scars can be the hardest to heal, affecting people’s integration into society and the economy.
        That’s why rehab has to be integral – a process that Vivian Pellas experienced personally, and one that she is now able to provide for under-privileged children at Aproquen.
        “The operation alone isn’t enough, because without speech therapy the child will not learn how to speak and then no one will understand him and he will become socially marginalized and eventually drop out of school,” Dr. IvetteIcaza says.  
      “Our accumulated experience has helped change the philosophy of treating burn patients in other countries,” Dr. Icaza said. “Now burn victims are being treated with more of a multi-disciplined response – rehabilitation, psychological counseling, nutrition education, speech therapy – and not just plastic surgery.”  
        After years of great efforts, the burn unit’s success has also been noticed internationally. Now Aproquen is exporting its knowledge to other countries in Central America. And it’s changing the way burn victims are treated throughout the region.
        Thanks to Aproquen’s outreach, Honduras now has its own rehabilitation center for burn patients (started by another survivor of flight 414) and doctors from Guatemala and Costa Rica are receiving training from Aproquen specialists to start burn units in those countries.
        Aproquen also focuses heavily on prevention. Doctors and staff regularly visit schools with photo books to teach children about burn-risk factors, and have been instrumental in getting legislation passed to regulate the sale of fireworks – an obsessive behavior in Nicaragua that becomes particularly compulsive in December 2012.
        The Christmas-season prevention campaigns, done in coordination with the accident prevention team, the Health Ministry, the National Police and firefighters, are working. In the holiday season of 2012, Aproquen treated only two children who suffered burns from Christmas explosives – down from 19 burn victims two years ago.
        Aproquen also notes a reduction in the percentage of new patients who need reconstructive surgeries and long-term integral care, indicating that prevention campaigns are helping to teach children to avoid risky situations. In the future, APROQUEN will invest in education and burn prevention, preventing tragedy from reoccurring.
 
Turning Tragedy into Hope · Turning Tears to Smiles
        Under her leadership, over the past 24 years, APROQUEN has provided 460,000 free medical care, 18,567 medical treatments, 33,468 surgeries and 210,691 rehabilitations with 197,483 outpatients. The entire medical care plan encompasses nutrition, children’s dentistry, plastic surgery, psychotherapy, health education and consultation, speech therapy and physical rehabilitation, etc. Additionally, it also offers free temporary quarters to families in remote areas who take their children for medical treatment. It has become Central America’s first and Latin America’s second charity providing comprehensive care to burn children. Moreover, APROQUEN assisted the relevant medical institutions or staff to hone their capacity in Palestine, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panam. Meanwhile, it partners with many international medical institutions, such as Memorial Hermann Health System, Physicians for Peach, EDUPLAST, International Women and Children’s Burn Foundation, SOS Médecin, Brown University Plastic Surgery, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, BaltimoreMedical Center, and Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation (Taiwan).
        For Vivian Pellas, the unfairness of her injuries struck her during the painful months of her rehabilitation in 1989.
        When she went to therapy in the United States and all the other patients were 80 or 90 years old. And she remembers thinking, “My God, I am only 33. I am just starting my life and my children are just babies. Why me?”  
        But she says her faith in God helped her get through the difficult moments and gave her the strength to convert her tragedy into hope for others – a philosophy that is reflected in Aproquen’s slogan: Turning tears into smiles.  
        “The accident was a horrible tragedy, but it led to good because this hospital has saved and continues to save the lives of many children.” She says, “We want to convert a tragedy into happiness and hope for others.”  
       26 years has passed since the plane crash. Vivian is still not satisfied with the achievements of APROQUEN. As long as people suffer pain from burns, she will continue to serve them. “People’s lives can indeed change in the blink of an eye. But what matters is what people choose to do about it afterwards”, she says.
        After narrowly escaping plane wreckage and tortured by pain, now Vivian Pellas seeks to revolutionize health care for Nicaragua and open a new chapter of medical care for other burn victims in the developing world.