HOLYOKE — A Southampton doctor will bring an extra $500 from the Holyoke Police Department on his upcoming annual trip to Haiti to provide medical aid in remote villages.
The Holyoke Police Officer’s Ball Committee presented a check for that amount to Dr. Mark Bigda on Saturday for his Easthampton-based nonprofit, Mustard Seed Missions, Inc., which provides medical aid to remote villages in Haiti.
“We can treat half the children of an entire village with what the Holyoke Police Department gave us today,” Bigda said at the presentation at the Holyoke Police Department. “That’s just phenomenal.”
A Southampton internist affiliated with Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Bigda is a founding member of the nonprofit and has been making annual trips to Haiti since 2004. He also is the prison physician for Hampshire County, the school physician for the city of Easthampton, serves as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force and is a flight surgeon to the 131st Fighter Squadron.
Capt. Matthew Moriarty of the Holyoke Police Department said that he has long known of Dr. Bigda’s work and some of his officers have Bigda as their primary care doctor.
Each year, the Holyoke Police Officer’s Ball Committee organizes events, races and fundraisers to connect with and give back to the community. This year, Moriarty said, the committee was excited to organize a raffle to donate to Mustard Seed Missions, Inc., to show what local people who volunteer for the nonprofit are doing on a global level.
“This is really an opportunity for their group to stand center stage and let the area know that we have residents who are doing this kind of fantastic work,” Moriarty said.
Sue Igel and Robert Cross were among the volunteers gathered at the check presentation who will be traveling with Bigda on his next weeklong trip in late April.
Igel works with Bigda as a medical assistant and this year’s trip will be her fourth.
“Dr. Bigda’s work really went to my heart,” she said. “It’s a life-changing experience. You take a whole new outlook on life and what you have, the gifts you’re given and you don’t even realize it.”
Cross said he was visiting Bigda for a checkup when a photo of the doctor in Haiti inspired him to ask if his skills as a lab tech could be useful on the next trip.
“It becomes a part of you,” Cross said of the trips.
Both Igel and Cross said they keep going back on Mustard Seed Mission trips because of the gratitude, appreciation and overwhelming need of the people in the rural Haitian villages they travel to help.
Bigda’s son, Zach Bigda, said he has been going with his father to Haiti since he was 15 years old. Now 27, he said the annual trips nourished an interest in medicine, leading him to emergency medical technician school and work as a paramedic and firefighter.
“When you take someone’s blood pressure or give a kid a Matchbox car in Haiti, they react like it’s the greatest thing in the world,” the junior Bigda said.
His father also pointed to the appreciation of the people he helps as a reason he continues to go back year after year, and added that the trips allow him to practice medicine, purely and simply.
“We’re seeing people who have never seen a physician before or have waited a year for us to come back to treat them,” the elder Bigda said.
Referring to the difference between his work here and there, he added, “Practicing medicine now is three-quarters paperwork, jumping through hoops, and red tape laid out by the insurance companies and the government and the state. When I go to Haiti, I’m nothing more than a doctor.”