It all started with an ad in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Patricia Brock Howard had taken some time off from medicine to raise her children. She was flipping through the magazine when an ad seeking medical supply donations caught her eye.

“I cut it out,” Brock Howard recalls. “And I sent away for more information.”

It was the 1990s, so rather than Googling, she waited for a reply via the mailbox..

Around the same time, she had an opportunity to go on a medical mission to El Salvador with her church, West U Methodist.

Brock Howard decided to get her passport and serve on the mission. Everything seemed to gel. Before she knew it, she was on the plane to El Salvador, reading the information that had just arrived in the mail about the ad in the AMA journal.

What she learned was disturbing. A doctor