Oct 10, 2010 / 11:14 am
Every Saturday a small clinic, tucked away inside the parish hall of St. Joseph Church in Newton, N.C., opens its doors to uninsured people who can’t get medical care anywhere else. The waiting room – once not much more than a storage closet – quickly fills up with people hoping to see the doctor, Dr. Douglas Miller.
St. Joseph’s Good Samaritan Clinic has served more than 4,000 people since it opened 15 years ago. That’s about 20-24 people each Saturday, Miller estimates. The clinic doesn’t
ask for payment; patients may give a $5 donation, if they like.
Miller and Miguel Caraballo, both parishioners at St. Aloysius Church in Hickory, worked together to open the indigent clinic after Caraballo prayed to Jesus, asking for help for the Hispanic community. Caraballo was seeing Hispanics neglect their health because they had no means to pay a doctor or because they could not speak adequate English.
The only place they could turn to was the local hospital’s emergency room.