Photo: Alvaro Ortiz / Washington Hispanic

Dr. Leonel Flores (der)., president of the Directorate of the Clinic of the People, gives the welcome and expresses his support to the new director of this institution, Alice Wilson.

Víctor Caycho
Washington Hispanic

At his 39 years, the doctor Leonel Flores is recognized like one of the Hispanic scientific investigators most emphasized in the metropolitan area of Washington DC, with a lot of recognition along his career, which initiated in his native country, El Salvador, and which continues successfully, for eight years, in the United States.
Flowers, who has just been a renowned president of the Directorate of the Clinic of the People, assumes with model modesty this situation. Not without earlier expressing “my support and of the whole directory” to the new director of the institution, Alice Wilson, “a North American who has adopted the Latin culture as all his pores”.
From below
The history of Dr. Leonel Flores is not simple at all. On the contrary, it is an incredible chain of victories on the adversity.
His professional vocation was born from his earliest infancy. “I do not remember it but my mother, Maria Higinia Flores, tells me that when it always had approximately 4 years he was asking him for a white sports shirt, and he was saying to him that he wanted to be a doctor”, he says.
From the primary education he was interested very much by the biology, but the public school where he studied, in San Miguel, El Salvador, it was very humble “and with scarce resources to study. Nevertheless, of nine years that the primary one studied, in eight years it went out with honors, in the first position.

Photo Alvaro Ortiz / Washington Hispanic

“I learned to study and to work at the same time”, remembers Dr. Leonel Flores.

With many will, he decided from child to face the lack of money working. “I started from nine years, when I began doing gardening, works of construction and painting and even of shoe shop, to be able to buy my useful ones and my school texts”.
It appeared to the examination of the school of medicine, with 1.500 candidates for very few squares. “When my name appeared in the newspaper accepted in the national university, between in panic, because he was thinking about the books of medicine, which are very expensive”.
His mother then emigrated to the USA, “to New Jersey, one November 6, the day of my birthday, which I could not celebrate with her, since he traveled to take care babies and to help to pay my studies”.
One to one was mending the obstacles and penuries that were appearing before him, “especially in the second year of medicine, when the war was and the oriental area where I was living was one of the most affected”.
“ We were spending most of the time without electric power and he was forcing that us to study with sails, and oil lamps, until high hours of the dawn”, it mentions. He adds that they had to ask for the not claimed corpses of the cemeteries “to be able to take them to the laboratory of anatomy that we implement in San Miguel with the help of other partners and teachers”.
In San Salvador and it did his boarding school in the National Medical center. In this epoch, I had his fiancée and current wife, Denisse Hernández, “whom I met from before entering the university and had all his support and he waited for me, and when I finished the boarding school I married, at the age of 22, and my first son was born”.
His mother could not be present at the marriage because then it had no documents. “She had a few opposing feelings, a part of happiness but other one of sadness because she was thinking that there my studies were ending”.
“ That did not happen and on the contrary it gave me more forces to complement my career, and when I graduated my second son was born and I crowned my career in 1994”, he affirms.
The hour of emigrating
It was running the year 2000 when his mentor, Dr. Guillermo González García, who is the father of the internal medicine in El Salvador, said to him that it had already managed very much in his country and that it had capacity as to go forward in the exterior.
This way it resolved to come to the United States, with a recommendation for a scientific investigator of New York, but they happened six months and it did not obtain answer. Until (kidneys) and scientific investigator received a call of Dr. Mario Henríquez, a specialist in nefrología in New York. With him it was employed at the investigation of diabetes and hypertension. Three years later, in 2004, it developed a medicines study for the blood pressure that gave him enough successes, and they invited it to fill a vacancy of clinical investigation in the University of Maryland.
In 2007 they name it Manager of Program of Health in the school of medicine of the University of Maryland, in a division of adolescents. “There I am lucky to work with the Dra. Ligia Peralta, an eminence in the investigation of AIDS in adolescents and much recognized in the scientific ambience; she is my chief and a model to be continued”, it points out.
With Juan Romagoza
Dr. Flores remembers that two years ago it was invited by the delegate Ann Sol Gutiérrez, so that it takes part in the Directorate of the Clinic of the People, “because she was entrusting that she could contribute many good consultancy, which in that one then was already beginning having problems, and this way it was that I met Juan Romagoza, founder and the director, with whom we identify with the mission”.
In October, 2006 it was founded “It recovers, Meter DC”, a Salvadorans' organization in the metropolitan area, which for unanimity it executive director chose.
Now Flores points out that as President of the Directorate of the Clinic of the People hopes to promote “that the quality of the attention is better every day and that the services do not come down to the persons but, on the contrary, that is a clinic of open doors”.
“ There are two things that I have always liked, the scientific investigation and the community health or the prevention of the health. I will continue where God should want and where it could serve better to the community”, it pronounces itself finally.