For spring break, Steve and Diane Foley and their son, Ben, flew to the Caribbean to spend a week removing fibroid tumors, doing hysterectomies and running basketball clinics.

Huh?

Steve and Diane are doctors. Ben is a high school basketball player.

OK, now it makes sense. Sort of.

This wasn’t some one-time, feel-good trip related to the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The docs have done about 20 self-funded surgical missions to Haiti over the years. Typically, it’s a hiatus to do hysterectomies because there are few specialists on the poor island nation.

“We have a connection,” says Diane, 50, who grew up in Haiti, the daughter of Wesleyan missionaries. “The country has a hold on me.”

After the earthquake, Steve, 52,  an OB/GYN, left their Advanced Gynecology medical practice here to spend a week in Haiti doing emergency medicine.

This time, it was back to their typical medical work in a hospital about 100 miles from the quake’s epicenter. They were back in their element.

Steve dealt with female problems. Diane, a pediatrician, treated children at the hospital and taught classes to Haitian nurses in Creole, their native language.

And Ben, 18, a Coronado High School point guard, ran basketball clinics wherever he could. At a ward with children bedridden in casts, Ben had them tossing balls bed-to-bed. He also helped build houses when he wasn’t scrubbing in with his dad to help with surgeries.

See pictures of the Foleys’ trip online at the Your Space blog at yourspace.freedomblogging.com.

Want to help?

Haiti needs manpower as well as money. The Foleys are organizing teams to help Haitians rebuild homes, schools and churches. Contact them at: sdjsjb@aol.com.

“There are plenty of projects to do,” Steve says. “It’s amazing, the attitude of the people. They are moving on. I saw them cleaning out their destroyed houses, one rock at a time.”

Adds Diane: “The phrase we heard over and over: ‘Haiti is broken, but God is still there.’ People say they have not given up hope.”

Amid the rubble and rows of tarps are the subtle signs that Haitians are ready to move on.

Steve saw it in patients who came to see him for infertility, a topic that usually doesn’t rate among the problems in Haiti.

“People have infertility issues everywhere,” he says. “It is frustrating in the States; it is really frustrating in the Third World.

“The importance of having a kid transcends anything.”

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Ben Foley, 18, right, scrubs in with his dad, Dr. Steve Foley for a hysterectomy surgery in Haiti. Photo by

Rubbled Port-au-Prince from the air Photo by

Babies at an orphanage at Les Cayes Photo by