Guatemala Surgical Mission 2025

In March of 2025 Annie and I will be returning to Guatemala. This will be our fifth surgical volunteer trip as a podiatric surgeon and NICU nurse to treat children with neglected clubfoot.

Over the past year, your donations have contributed to two brand new operating rooms at the clinic, effectively doubling the clinic’s surgical capacity.

Our goal this year is to raise $30,000 to equip the new operating rooms with anesthesia equipment, lights, tables, instrumentation, and other necessary medical equipment and supplies. In the past, your donations have been incredibly generous. Please help us reach our goal this year!

Our trip is fully self-funded. Therefore, your donation will be used entirely for the medications, supplies, and equipment necessary to treat our patients.

While there, our team has performed hundreds of complex reconstructive surgical procedures on one of the most neglected groups of people in the world. Many of the children we care for have never seen a doctor before.

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Clubfoot is a deformity in which an infant's foot is turned inward, often so severely that the bottom of the foot faces sideways or even upward. If left untreated, it requires complex surgical repair.

As a doctor, I care about people—every day through my job as a foot surgeon, I’m able to help people get back their lives. I see patients able to walk again after years of pain – a huge smile across their face because they have hope. That smile is why I do what I do.

In my 30+ year career, nothing has made that more real than my surgical mission trips to Guatemala.

Together with a contingent of podiatric surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, and other medical professionals—including my wife, Annie, a NICU nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital—I traveled to San Lucas Toliman, Guatemala on a surgical mission trip in 2019, 2020, 2023, and 2024.

Our partners include Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare, The Podiatry Institute, and The Fidalgo Island Rotary Club, as well as several private donors to bring care to this community and build local capacity to achieve sustainable medical care for the community.

Simply put, the trip gave me a new sense of purpose. Of course, I’m forever grateful for my career as a podiatric surgeon at South Shore Medical Center. But this trip…this trip makes it all count. We get into our routines, and we lose sight of the impact that we have on people’s lives. This trip changed everything for me.

We want to return to the same hospital again this year, and we need your help.

We know we will encounter many patients with very complex medical problems requiring judicious evaluations and customized surgical plans plus skilled anesthesia, post-anesthesia care, and short-term hospital care. Acquiring the needed medications and supplies is becoming more challenging—and expensive.

And we don’t only want to perform surgeries when we go—while there are patients with critical needs who we will absolutely serve, we are also looking for ways to build the capacity of the hospital staff, with the ultimate goal of the hospital becoming more self-sustaining and attracting local, skilled healthcare providers to the area.

I hope you will consider donating whatever you can comfortably afford. Our trip is fully self-funded. Therefore, your donation will be used entirely for the medications, supplies, and equipment necessary to treat our patients.

Thank you,

Wynn Perlick, DPM

Boston, Massachusetts