At the top of his to-do list was the item, “Do surgery to repair cleft palates and other deformities for children in the Third World.” That was 31 years ago, and Robinson is still working on item number one.
“For some reason, my wife and I just fell in love with that little town,” the doctor recalls. The little town is a community in northeast Honduras, the poorest country in Central America. To call Coyoles “remote” is an understatement: on a Google satellite map, the countryside looks like a wilderness of banana trees with rivers and creeks running through it. And mostly, it is.
With muddy trails taking the place of paved roads, the location is best known as a 17,000-acre dot on the corporate map of giant Standard Fruit Company's (more recently known as Dole Foods') holdings. The company has long operated a small clinic for employees there, with a few doctors and nurses. A typical day's cases include everything from routine medical complaints to severe tendon damage from machete accidents.
Robinson, his wife Kitty, and their young daughter (now an adult who practices gynecology in Alexander City) were vacationing in the Caribbean decades ago when they first came across the place, he says, and he couldn't get the contrast of the poverty and the natural beauty out of his mind.
The chance encounter eventually fed the idea for what's now The Robinson Foundation, a non-profit that supports the Robinsons and a growing number of their friends and colleagues on regular mission trips to Coyoles.
“The number of people who have stepped up to help—many of whom we didn't know before—has just been remarkable,” Robinson says. “There are several missionary groups we keep in touch with, regularly. And once a year they send an 18-wheeler to Birmingham for us. My wife is talented at finding free stuff, and she's able to fill up the truck for them.
“The truck then continues on to a pier in Gulfport, Mississippi, where the container is loaded onto a banana boat bound for Honduras,” Robinson says. “We're exempted from paying duty on them. But the only way to get the supplies from the dock to Coyoles is by van, so we've got to get a new van pretty soon. This one is almost worn out.”
The process is also helped by the Honduras constitution, Robinson says, which requires corporations to give something back to the country in exchange for the natural resources—mostly wood and bananas—that they remove. So far, those benefits as well as private donors have helped the Foundation complete a small addition to the existing hospital, for surgery and a recovery room.
The facilities are a far cry from the high-tech hospitals where Robinson has practiced over the decades, but he says he doesn't miss that part—or miss the stress .and irregular hours that characterized the beginning of his career. “Even when I was doing a lot of emergency and trauma surgery, I just loved the work itself. A lot of it was gruesome stuff, like car wrecks, but even that was satisfying—the feeling of fixing something that needed fixing.”
Plus, Robinson says, his ongoing supply of energy is a sign that he apparently inherited healthy genes: “My mother lived to be 99,” he says, “so I'm hopeful.” When he turned 80 last year, he retired from doing surgery in the U.S., though he still drives from his home in Birmingham to Alexander City “a couple of days a week” to see long-time patients and visit family.
His office wall there is filled with photos of the Honduras surgical outcomes he's most proud of, over the years. Some show a pair of then-and-now images, young children with cleft palates alongside their current photographs in adolescence. One of the most extreme cases he remembers was a newborn girl who suffered from a rare deformity called choanal atresia. Basically she was born without a nose or an airway for breathing, and Robinson's corrective surgery supplied them.
“I've only seen one similar case in my career,” he says. “Infants who are born that way usually die. But she's about 12 now, and I've got a picture of her and a girlfriend, who had a leg deformity that we repaired, wearing their dresses and looking beautiful. It's really something.”
Asked what connection he, his family, and their fellow medical missionaries share that attracts them to such challenging work, Robinson gives the question some thought and finally says, “I guess we're just people who get a good feeling from helping others and not making money from it.”
“I think it's just a matter,” Mrs. Robinson adds, “of blooming where you're planted.”