Linking Far-Flung Mission Posts : Radio Hams: Voices in the Wilderness

A missionary deep in the jungles of Peru was desperately trying to reach help for 14 children who had been suddenly stricken with an eye disease that rendered them temporarily blind.

And because Paul Jerome Stack of Vista, a key West Coast member of the International Mission Radio Assn., had his amateur radio tuned to a special frequency that day, help was dramatically on its way within a matter of hours.

The International Mission Radio Assn. is a unique organization of 700 members in 40 countries who check in on the 20-meter (14.280 megahertz) band from 11 a.m. to noon (Pacific Standard Time) Monday through Saturday to exchange information, relay messages and handle emergency communications.

“I was the only one on the missionary net who could hear the Peruvian missionary’s small, low-power station,” Stack, 65, who has been a “ham” (amateur) radio operator for 52 years, recalled the other day. “This guy was so far from civilization that his only other means of communication was having the natives beat drums and pass the message from tribe to tribe down the river.”

Phone Patch

Stack, using a “phone patch”--a device that connects a telephone to a radio transmitter and receiver--telephoned an Escondido eye specialist. The missionary and the doctor talked directly about treating the ailing children but, unfortunately, the missionary did not have the necessary medications. And obtaining them would require a week or more.

However, an organization in Lima, Peru, that flies medical supplies to missionaries was also tuned into the missionary net. The radio operator there could hear Stack’s side of the conversation, but not the Peruvian missionary. (Atmospheric conditions and geography often influence the range and strength of signals on amateur radio frequencies, blocking out some and boosting others.)

Stack, who has been a member of the radio association for 20 years, relayed the exact location of the missionary compound, and the drugs were airdropped the next day. “Four or five days later,” Stack said with a smile, “the missionary was on the air again to tell me, ‘Praise God, all 14 children have recovered from their eye disease and every one can see!’ ”

Not all conversations on the missionary net are so urgent.

On a recent Monday, Stack and two visitors in his cluttered “radio shack”--an extra bedroom in his ranch-style home eight miles from Oceanside--listened in while Jerry Simon, a missionary stationed in Chiquimula, Guatemala, talked to Thomas Wheeler of Palmyra, Wis.

Birth News

“I have a new grand-niece born this morning at 9:35, and we’re all tickled to death,” exclaimed Simon, whose voice crackled above the static and a low-pitched whine emanating from Stack’s Hallicrafter amplifier.

Although missionary net members on the East Coast can reach into European and African stations, and West Coast operators like Stack can pick up stations in Japan and the South Pacific, broadcasting conditions between most U.S. locations and South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean area are usually very good.

Thus, in addition to helping remote missionaries keep in touch with their home base and stateside friends and relatives, the missionary network has often been pressed into service to handle emergency communications during natural disasters in Latin America.

When Hurricane David ripped through the Caribbean in 1979, leaving 80,000 people homeless, Catholic Relief Services called on the mission radio group to maintain contact with relief officials who could not be reached through other channels. For more than a week, ham radio operators provided the only communications link between the agencies, planeloads of supplies and medicines, and relief directors on the islands.

Earlier, in 1972, when a December earthquake rattled Nicaragua, the radio association was the official emergency channel. More than 13,000 health and welfare messages were handled by the net, which meticulously logs each conversation as “a piece of traffic.”

Guatemala-Houston Link

In 1976, during the disastrous Guatemala earthquake, the net was again loaded with emergency traffic; Bryon Lovelady, a Methodist minister in Houston, was on the air nonstop for four days handling communications between Roosevelt Hospital in Guatemala City and the research department of the Houston Medical Center.

The International Mission Radio Assn. is closely associated with the Medical Amateur Radio Council, a 650-member group of medical and health-care professionals. And the net also offers emergency medical advice through a connection with the University of Alabama Medical School and Hospital in Birmingham.

“The club has arranged for phone-patch contact with their medical personnel,” said Father Michael Mullen, a Vincentian priest who is a theology professor at St. John’s University in New York City and the current president of the radio association. “The service is multifaceted and bilingual.”

And it has made a life-or-death difference more than once.

In late 1979, a measles epidemic swept through Honduras, and net member Ruth Paz, who works with two hospitals in San Pedro Sula, radioed for help because the local doctors did not have enough vaccine. Within two weeks, 50,000 doses of vaccine, donated by the Communicable Diseases Section of the Central Americas Office of the World Health Organization, were airlifted into Honduras. The Birmingham university complex handled all arrangements.

‘Father Mike’

“Father Mike,” as his networking colleagues call him, also tells the story of an 8-year-old Honduran girl who had been severely burned. The radio association arranged for her travel, hospitalization and extensive skin grafting in a Miami hospital. Through the efforts of Paz, the girl even talked from her hospital bed, via shortwave radio, with her father 800 miles away.

One year, Paz also helped arrange for 45,000 pairs of eyeglasses to be donated and sent to Honduras, and she persuades a dozen or more U.S. dentists to spend a week each January treating poor children there. In May and October, she arranges for physicians from a group called Interplast, based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Stanford University Medical School’s Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, to provide free surgery to Central American children with burns and birth defects.

One of Paz’s most recent mercy missions involved Erica Minerva Nolasco, 8, who was struck by a truck last September. The Honduran youngster sustained multiple injuries--including a severed leg--that needed specialized help unavailable in Honduras. Through the ham net, Paz arranged for Interplast to send consultants to Honduras. Meanwhile, residents in Erica’s hometown and an American school donated funds to fly her to New Orleans. And in Manasquan, N.J., radio club member Warren Mulhall coordinated radio phone-patch efforts to find a hospital that would treat the youngster without charge.

Borrowed Lear Jet

Paz accompanied Erica on the commercial flight to New Orleans, and an anonymous donor lent his Lear jet for the final segment of the trip to Hartford, Conn., where the girl was admitted to the trauma center at St. Francis Hospital.

“She is still in the hospital,” Mullen said last week, “but she’s doing fine and has been fitted with a prosthesis. Her recovery is remarkable.”

Growth of the mission radio club is also remarkable, notes Mullen, 70, who operates his 1,000-watt station from a cramped cubbyhole just outside the student lounge at St. John’s University. In 1966, when he “stumbled into this fascinating field of amateur radio,” the Catholic Mission Radio Assn.--as it was known then--had about only 50 members.

Within the last five years, the association--now interdenominational--has doubled its membership and increased its broadcasting activity by 25%. Walter Walker, the International Mission Radio Assn.’s net “manager” who works out of Nokomis, Fla., estimates it receives 19,000 “check-ins” and 10,000 “pieces of traffic” (successful linkups) annually.

“But we missionaries never talk religious doctrine or politics. It would be crazy to do so,” Mullen said, observing that Nicaraguan police recently removed a member’s rig from his home for what they said was a violation of that rule.

Soviet Hams

Stack, who has “QSL cards” (exchange cards with the name and call letters of ham operators who contact each other) plastered on the walls of his radio room, pointed to several from the Soviet Union and other Communist countries.

“In Communist countries, they (hams) can give their first name and talk about the weather, their rig and a little about their families. The missionaries are very careful in their conversations, and we do not ask questions,” he said, adding that he has never heard a missionary read the Bible or give a sermon on the ham band.

And although the mission network could help channel communications regarding medical aid and relief in famine-stricken Ethiopia, Stack said he doubts there are any ham operators in that African country: “I’ve never heard of one on the nets,” he said.

The radio association’s 700 members include 25 religious communities and dioceses in addition to individuals in every walk of life--and even a few celebrities: Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.); William Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, and Father Dan Lineham, S.J., a radio association charter member and noted seismologist who was the first to measure the thickness of ice at the North Pole. (Overall, there are about 400,000 licensed ham operators in the United States; they spend $200 million a year on their equipment.)

Stack, sipping an iced glass of mint sun tea, noted that on this particular day, when a reporter and photographer visited to eavesdrop on the 20-meter band, the net had only 67 check-ins and 18 pieces of traffic--”a slow day.”

“We need more Southern California hams for the missionary net,” he said. “Many missionaries out there would love to talk to their relatives at home base. And they need help in emergencies.”