Photo by Geoffrey D. Brown

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In April 2005, Dr. Julian Choe of Frederick went on a mission to eastern Guatemala. After a three-hour hike to the remote mountain village of El Chilar, he met a 7-year-old girl and her family. He was struck by the beauty of the child and the tragedy of her condition.

She could walk until the age of 3, when she contracted a severe infection followed by seizures, her family told Dr. Choe. Since then, she has been unable to walk or speak or control her muscles and has been confined to a wheelchair. Dr. Choe believes her condition may have been caused by asphyxia — cutting off oxygen to her brain and causing permanent damage.

When he returned home, he couldn’t get Mirza Lopez out of his head. He told his wife, Karen, who was haunted by the story as well. He wanted to help her any way he could, and even considered bringing her and her mother to the United States for medical care. Dr. Choe and his wife agreed he should go back to Guatemala in August.

But when he returned to El Chilar, the little girl and her family were gone. The people of El Chilar said they had moved somewhere across the river, but did not know where.

The following day, Dr. Choe and the missionaries went to Pie de la Cuesta, a village across the river, to pick up a generator.

Dr. Choe asked about the little girl in the wheelchair.

“I didn't even know her name,” he said.

The houses of Pie de la Cuesta, which means “foot of the mountain” are tucked behind thickets of trees and hills, spread across the lower slopes of a mountain above the wide river. Dr. Choe and Robert Jackson, resident missionary, went back a second day in their continuing search for the little girl.

“I went back … to find her, stopped anyone on the street and asked about the girl," Dr. Choe said. "No one knew.”

He stopped a woman and asked about the child; the woman said she didn’t know her.

“We talked for at least five minutes on something else, and then suddenly she stopped the conversation and shouted that she now remembered the little girl.”

“All of a sudden she shouted, ‘That’s my relative.’”

The woman gave directions to the family’s home.

Approaching the small hut with Mr. Jackson, Dr. Choe said he wondered if it was the right place. “We slowly walked down, and there she was, sitting in her wheelchair, wearing the same blue dress she’d had on before.”

A deeply religious man, Dr. Choe said, “Some people say it’s all coincidence, but I think it was all planned by God.”

He proposed to build a church in Pie de la Cuesta with the support of resident missionaries Robert Jackson and Tharsis Rodriguez-Jackson and their church, the Resurrection Worship Center of Allentown, Pa.

Luck would have it, too — providence, Dr. Choe believes — that a relative of the Lopez family owned a flat plot of land near the family’s home that could be used for the church. Once the details for the church were worked out, the Jacksons had the site cleared with a bulldozer.

Dr. Choe put up the $7,000 for building materials.

On June 12, 10 months after the doctor’s last trip, a team of missionaries, villagers, construction specialists, a crew of men from the Puente Blanco refugee camp, and Mirza’s father, Mario Lopez, built the church for Mirza.

Although Mirza’s family is rich in friends, they are as poor as anyone in the impoverished villages that dot the rugged landscape. Mirza, her parents and six brothers and sisters live in a one-room shack with a detached kitchen made of wooden stakes. Her mother, Maria Carmelia Ramirez Perez, cares for her seven children aged 18 months to 15 years, and is expecting her eighth.

In June Mirza’s hair had begun to grow in after being shaved because of an infestation of lice. She sat in her wheelchair wearing a bright pink dress, and smiled and cooed for a visitor. Her animated eyes watched everything and seemed to contradict her physical state, insisting that she is an active, engaged little girl. But the reality is that she can do nothing for herself. Dr. Choe said the damage is irreversible, and there is little benefit to taking her away from her home for treatment.

But Dr. Choe will be back. He’s already planning a return in October, his sixth mission trip to Guatemala.