Ventura nonprofit's effort in Ethiopia featured in documentary
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VENTURA, Calif. - Sharon Daly taught elementary students in Oxnard for 37 years but had a past life she rarely mentioned to her young students.
Evan Cantrell, one of her former students, remembers how patiently she taught him to read when he was struggling in third grade, and he remembers how surprised he was to find out years later that Daly had gone on to devote her life to eradicating a disease found mostly in tropical Ethiopia.
“Wow, my teacher is like Indiana Jones, going to Third World countries and helping people,” said Cantrell, who reconnected with Daly after a business networking event. “I knew her as a schoolteacher in Oxnard. She had mentioned this disease called mossy foot, but she didn’t get too much into it, so I was really surprised.”
Daly runs the Ventura-based Mossy Foot Project, started by her father, Nathan Barlow. The nonprofit’s efforts were featured in a short documentary called “Operation Change: Ethiopia,” which aired this month on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
The Mossy Foot Project began in 1945 when Barlow and his young wife moved to Ethiopia so he could offer his medical services to an indigenous population with no experience in Western medicine.
“Being the only doctor for over a million people (in southern Ethiopia), working 24 hours a day with a full surgical load, training medical assistants, traveling constantly to identify epidemics, he didn’t have time to specialize,” Daly said. “But in the early ’50s, a woman came to his clinic. She couldn’t walk. She had to scoot on her bottom and push herself with her hands. She had this foot disease that no one had ever heard of, now called mossy foot.
“My father thought it might be elephantiasis, but he looked it up in his medical books and found he could treat it. She responded well to skin grafts and was able to go on to live a normal life.”
Barlow and his family had to leave Ethiopia in 1977 when the government was overthrown by communist rebels. Daly settled in Ventura County with her husband, Jim Daly, and had no plans to go back to Africa.
But the Ethiopian government in 1997 invited Barlow, who had become a legend in the region, to return, and he decided to open a clinic specializing in treating mossy foot.
The disease, formally called podoconiosis, is caused by exposure to rich tropical soils containing silica or volcanic glass. Sufferers can develop massive infections and swellings. The disease is not contagious and can be cured if caught early relatively simply, by careful washing with soap, water and a disinfectant, or by surgery if necessary.
“Because these people suffered so much, so much stigma, and were shunned like lepers, my father started the Mossy Foot Project,” Daly said. “My father passed away in 2004, but he had been telling people who asked: ‘Oh, I’m not concerned about the Mossy Foot Project. I have a strong daughter who will take care of it.’ I guess somehow we knew.”
Daly and her husband split their time between Ethiopia and Ventura. Locally, they raise money for the Mossy Foot Project, which works with other Christian aid projects, including the Starkey Hearing Foundation.
The Mossy Foot Project treats up to 3,000 people a month, Daly said, reaching about 60 percent of the population of Ethiopia at a cost of about $100 per year per patient, or about $22,000 a month overall. Daly said that although it is a Christian ministry, it treats anyone in need.
“It’s just heartwarming,” she said. “I often come to tears when I am sitting in the clinics and hearing the patients’ stories. It’s very rewarding. These patients’ lives are changed forever and for the better.”
Cantrell, who now co-owns a film production company based in Ventura County, continues to admire his former teacher and support her work.
“She was a great teacher,” he said. “I needed tutoring, and she would stay after school and give me all the time in the world and then drop me off at home afterwards. Her retiring from teaching to continue her father’s work was a really bold move, and it’s a big statement from her, to say that you should do what you love and really go after what you want to do for people.”
On the Net: The documentary is at http://www.operationchange.com/episode/ethiopia
