Family gift builds clinic in El Salvador

On Monday a medical clinic will open in Jucuapa, a rural municipality in El Salvador that has few other such facilities nearby. The clinic will occupy 40,000 square feet and include two operating rooms, a pharmaceutical lab, dental suites, examination rooms and waiting areas.

None of it would have happened had it not been for Bradley King and his family, owners of Garden City-based David King Enterprises, commercial landlords. The King family donated $1.7 million of its own money to build the facility. The reason: Some years ago, King's father, David, suffered a burst appendix while in Tampa, Fla., and his life was saved by a Salvadorean doctor, Roberto Arevalo-Araujo, at a Tampa hospital. David King decided to donate to build the facility, to be called David V. King Medical Center.

Bradley King said his father, who died in 2004 at age 80, was once shown pictures of the existing facilities in the Jucuapa area. "My father said, 'We'll build our own hospital,' " King said.

Planning of the facility was overseen by David Hawk and his wife, Debbie Hawk, missionaries with the World Gospel Mission, headquartered in Marion, Ind. "We hope to see about 100 patients daily in our general practice and to do more than 500 ambulatory surgeries a year," David Hawk wrote in a WGM newsletter.