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Our specialists are happy to discuss your individual case with you. Serious inquiries only, please. For an appointment, call 303-783-9220. DIRECTOR: CNI Rocky Mountain Cochlear Implant
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History
of the World Hearing NetworkWhen the Denver Ear Institute (predecessor of the CNI Center for Hearing) was just a few years old, its charismatic creator, Dr. Bob Mischke, traveled to Mexico on vacation with his family. While he was there, he had car trouble in a suburb of Mexico City. He knocked on the door of a nearby house and through total serendipity, met a local doctor, an otolaryngologist. Bob listened to the doctor talk about the community needs and the two doctors developed a friendship that lead to Bob and the Denver Ear Institute (DEI) to ship an entire sound booth to Mexico, for use in the community. Thus the vision of the World Hearing Network was born.
In 1988, over one of their regular monthly cups of coffee, Bob, and the then-President of the DEI Board of Trustees, Mary Villalba, discussed the need to expand the mission of the DEI to include an outreach program to communities all over the world. At the following DEI Board meeting Bob and Mary brought back an oral proposal to explore the possibility of such a program, under the umbrella of the Denver Ear Institute. The Board was impressed with Bob’s experience in Mexico.
In January 1989, Mary and her husband, Julio, traveled to Lima, Peru, on the first “official” World Hearing Network trip. Mary, with the assistance of friends and family in Peru, visited two major hospitals in Lima, the State Hospital, and the French Benevolent Hospital, a hospital begun by French nuns for the poor, who had no other health services available. Mary brought back news to the DEI, that there was a need and a very strong interest in developing a partnership with the WHN.
Mary’s bags were not unpacked, when Bob announced he had made arrangements for the second WHN trip, within a month of the trip to Peru. Mary, Bob and Jaime Smith, took off for two weeks in Ecuador, in February of 1989, to work with Dr. Cal Wilson, setting up surgeries in the hospital in Quito. Then Cal took Mary and Bob on an eight-day excursion into the jungles of Ecuador, where they tested hearing, helped delivery a baby and set a broken nose. The stories were epic, and when Bob received a live chicken from the mother of one young man whom they had treated; all three cried.
Coming back to the Board of the DEI with stories and slides of the first two trips inspired both the board and the medical staff to move forward in structuring the WHN. The next several trips, as the team grew, were to Costa Rica. The first of which, Mary asked her friend, Tito Chiverri, Costa Rican Consul, to accompany them. Having Tito along expedited arrangements to meet with individuals like Congresswoman, Karen Figueres, the heads of the major hospitals in Costa Rica, and many other prominent individuals, such as Nobel Prize winner and Past President, Oscar Arias; all of whom wanted to help. The toehold in Latin America was established as the WHN began to both do and teach, cochlear implant surgeries and hundreds of tympanaplasties. On many of the trips, mothers and their children would begin lining up two weeks in advance of the surgeries, with hopes that their child would be chosen for the surgery. On one of the first surgery missions in Costa Rica, there were more than 350 potential patients to choose from. The WHN also began to ship copious amounts of medical equipment to Latin America, for use in the hospitals of Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras and Peru.
The fourth trip, which was also to Costa Rica, was comprised of a team of 20 doctors, nurses, audiologists and non-medical WHN members. Included on that team were Bob Mischke and his wife, Jenka, Jaime Smith, Mary Villalba, and David Kelsall, M.D. The World Hearing Network had truly become a worldwide resource for the hearing impaired.
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Colorado Neurological
Institute Center for Hearing
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