How we got started …
By Susan Dix Lyons
The story with Clinica Verde actually starts with my grandparents. In the 1970’s, my grandpa, a small-town newspaper publisher from Ohio, was actively involved in the Inter American Press Association. He served as the organization’s President and also as Chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee. As a result of this work, he and my grandmother traveled throughout Latin America, establishing lasting friendships with newspaper publishers and their families across the region. Among these trips, they traveled to Nicaragua and became friends with the editor of La Prensa, Pedro Chamorro, and his wife Violeta.
As a girl, I grew up hearing stories about my grandparent’s travels and friendships. I heard how Pedro Chamorro had been imprisoned in the 1970s for being critical of the Somoza regime. My grandfather traveled to the country with a delegation of the Inter American Press Association to argue for amnesty on one occasion when Chamorro was imprisoned. But in 1978, Pedro Chamorro was assassinated by unknown gunmen.
Years later, I graduated from college and moved to San Jose, Costa Rica, for my first job: as intern and reporter for The Tico Times. In 1990, I traveled to Managua, Nicaragua for the presidential election between Sandinista revolutionary Daniel Ortega and Pedro Chamorro’s widow, Violeta Chamorro. Violeta won that election, and I was somehow drawn into the improbable chain of history that connected a small-town Ohio newspaperman with a small Central American country.
After my work at The Tico Times, I moved on to other jobs throughout the years, working as a reporter and eventually becoming an editor and publisher myself at an urban newsweekly in Tampa Bay. Later, I moved to California with my family and, in 2006, heard about a local group building homes for the poor in the country of Nicaragua. My husband Tim, a physician, and I went on a trip with the local group and I was again drawn into the history and politics of the country that had moved my grandparents, and me as a girl, many years before.
I contacted Cristiana Chamorro, Violeta Chamorro’s daughter, and told her the story I had heard about my grandparents. Cristiana is a prominent journalist in Nicaragua and founder and director of The Violeta Chamorro Foundation. In 2007 I asked Cristiana if she would partner with me on a project to address the health needs of the poor in her country. She said yes.
From there, I returned to the States and invited the smartest people I knew in the relevant fields to be founding members of our Board of Directors: Don Farrar, Kenneth B. Weeman Jr., Peter Stanley, Margarita Gurdian, Bill Bylund, Dr. Elquis Castillo, Dr. Mary Huber, Rafael Rios, Dennis de Vreede and Dr. Tim Lyons, my amazing husband. Nothing would have happened without these extraordinary people – and Clinica Verde is equally a consequence of their passion, commitment and participation as it is mine.
That was the beginning of Clinica Verde, and the continuation of the story that began in the 1970’s with my grandparents. Both of my sons have been to Nicaragua on working trips, and have already fallen in love with the country themselves. I’m honored to be a part of the chain of global friendship and concern that started with my grandma and grandpa, who died in 2000.
