On a cold rainy day, looking out my window at the wet grass on the quiet park, I think of my friend Chelita.
That is how we called Doctor Graciela Sarmiento, a Peruvian born physician who died tragically last Friday, south of Ensenada, Mexico.
She had gone along a group from San Luis Obispo, California in a mission to Baja with the Flying Samaritans, a charitable group that does free medical procedures for low income people in rural Mexico.
The Beachcraft A-36 plane took off from the San Luis Obispo Airport, Friday morning and landed in Ensenada, Mexico. It then took off for it's final destination in San Quintin in Baja California.
At about 15 miles south of Ensenada, the pilot called the control tower and said he was climbing to get above heavy fog... radio contact was lost around 2 pm Friday.
The people aboard the plane were Roger Lyon an attorney and pilot from Cayucos, Doctor James Thornton MD a plastic surgeon from San Luis Obispo, Andrew Theil a Cal Poly Student and Paramedic and my friend Doctor Graciela Sarmiento MD a physician who worked at the Community Health Center in Oceano, California. All of them were wonderful selfless people, doing what they loved, helping the poor.
I met Doctor Graciela Sarmiento in 1993 at a bbq at the house of another physician friend, Alba Barberia from Argentina.
I found doctor Sarmiento to be sweet, bright, fun and someone very friendly.
She had moved from Seattle with her family to work at the CHC Clinic in Oceano, hired by yet another physician friend from Peru, Isabel Ruiz MD ( R.I.P )
Dr Sarmiento went to medical school in the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain graduating in 1984 and she did her residency at University of Kansas School of Medicine.
We had long conversations about our lives in South America, we being neighbors her from Peru and me from Chile we had similar cultural, culinary and musical memories. She was married and had three children, I did too.
Years later, she saved the life of my oldest son, when he was an inpatient at Arroyo Grande Hospital, taking over his medical treatment and aggressively treating him with antibiotics and thus controlling his rampant infection. I was forever in her debt.
Today I attended a Catholic Mass in her honor,along my son now a young man, at Saint Patrick's Church in Arroyo Grande, California. At least 600 or more people were there, the church was filled with teary eyed family members, friends, colleagues, patients and neighbors..
We heard about Graciela's kindness and tenderness, about what a great woman she was, a great wife, mom, daughter, sister, friend, neighbor and a super doctor.
She leaves behind her husband Jocelin, and her children Maya, Saioa and Sebastian
I had the pleasure afterwards to meet her sisters Camuncha, Patricia and her brother Francisco, all of them sweet as Chelita and I asked them to please let her mom and dad back in Lima, Peru know how much Chelita was loved and admired by so many, but what an imprint she left forever in my life.
Sonia Paz Baronvine
WCC Board Member
