Couple Storm to the Aid of Hurricane Victims

Some people just don’t know no. Like Michele Weber and Karl Reitz, a Brea couple who dived in as private citizens this month to help the poor in hurricane-ravaged Honduras.

Even when the bottom fell out of their plans--when many of us would have said, well, that’s that--Weber and Reitz found a way to keep going. So this week, after a little help from their friends, the two sent off a 13-member medical team to set up a makeshift clinic in Tegucigalpa, capital of the tiny Central American country.

The American Red Cross has its operation in place. So do scores of other nonprofit groups committed to helping the victims. Massive landslides and flooding in the region took more than 10,000 lives and wiped out the homes of thousands more.

But to give you an idea how significant one 13-member medical team can be: Wednesday, the first full day of the Weber-Reitz team’s operation, it treated 225 Hondurans suffering because of the devastation. This was two weeks after the hurricane hit, yet no doctor or nurse had been able to get to a single one of these patients before.

I asked Weber and Reitz how it felt now, knowing their work is paying off. Their response was to smile at each other, and you knew they were thinking back to last week, when they pulled off what some would have considered a crazy idea.

Weber, 33, is the Southwest regional director for a national nonprofit social activist group called Witness for Peace, which assists developing countries, mainly in Central America. Reitz, 58, is a longtime Chapman University professor. Before his current sabbatical, he was dean of its liberal arts school. Reitz is also on both the regional and national boards of Witness for Peace.

Weber this past summer spent several weeks in Honduras, helping with the investigation of the assassinations of several grass-roots political leaders. She came to love the people there.

So when she learned what Hurricane Mitch was doing to the country, she felt compelled to act. But Witness for Peace has almost no money for such special causes.

On Nov. 7, at a 15th anniversary dinner for the agency, she shared her frustration over the Honduran crisis with Dr. Felix Aguilar of Long Beach, who is on the agency’s advisory board. He agreed with her that sending medical supplies would help. But even better, he said almost as an aside, would be to send a medical team.

Weber lit up. She tracked down her husband across the room and asked what he thought. Let’s do it, he said.

Aguilar agreed to rearrange his schedule and lead the team, if money could be raised to send everyone needed. What came next was an 80-hour workweek for the two of them.

“We had two telephones going here at home, plus the cell phone, plus our fax machine,” Reitz said with a smile. “It was nuts around here.”

Weber added: “Our two children were great, eating out of cardboard boxes all week. We found we could get by on five hours’ sleep a night.”

First they had to get enough people to agree to rearrange their schedules for three weeks--four doctors, six medical students, two emergency technicians and a physician’s assistant.

“We owe a huge thanks to the deans at the medical schools at UCLA and UC Irvine,” Weber noted.

Through e-mailing family and friends, and with a nice check from the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, they came up with $3,000 for medical supplies. Each medical team member agreed to pay $400 out of pocket to cover part of the expenses. Weber and Reitz finagled an agreement with a major airline to cover the team members’ plane fares to Honduras.

That’s when the bottom fell out. When everything seemed finally set, Weber and Reitz learned on Friday the 13th that the airline arrangement had fallen through.

“That was a blow,” Weber said. “That was hitting rock bottom.”

But that didn’t stop them. They gathered up all the courage they had--and you can bet this part isn’t easy--and asked people they knew to come up with the $8,000 needed to succeed.

Weber went to the Sisters of St. Joseph’s in Orange, where she knew some of the staff. One had even been her teacher in a Catholic school. Reitz went to Jim Doti, president of Chapman and a longtime friend. Doti said he would get the university to match whatever Weber got from the Sisters of St. Joseph’s.

Each wound up donating $4,000.

Sister Nancy O’Connor, general superior at the Catholic agency, knew Weber’s work. She was also aware Weber needed the money immediately.

“I think I just sensed the conviction in Michele’s voice,” Sister Nancy said. “I knew the cause was important, but I also thought, here was a leader who so embodied the values we try to communicate in our schools.”

Doti considers it a great partnership with the Catholic organization.

“We are a nonprofit always looking for money ourselves,” he said. “We have to be very selective how we spend. This is a real testament to the kind of commitment Karl and Michele have shown to this cause.”

Monday of this week, checks in hand, they purchased the needed airline tickets. The team left on a red-eye from LAX that night and arrived in Honduras on Tuesday morning.

“When we saw the plane take off, we just gave each other high fives and hugged,” Reitz said. “We still can’t believe it came off.”

Not that they are finished. Weber is planning a second team before Christmas. All she needs is $14,000. I’ve got a feeling that somehow, she’ll find a way to get it.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com