Whether it was sports, science, attending college, or joining a fraternity, the Homans have done everything together.
But when it came to college, the Homans didn’t follow the same route. Jared Homan chose to attend John Carroll University for a year and a half, but now he is back at Hillsdale.
The Homans have been reunited.
“It’s definitely a lot more challenging and I think I’ll be able to be better off with an education from Hillsdale than an education from John Carroll,” Jared said.
Their choice to stay together, however, will not be short lived. Upon graduation, all three plan to attend medical school.
When the Homans were younger, their grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. With only six months to live, a pulmonoligist was able to save his life. So far, he has outlived those six months by 9 and a half years and counting.
“That’s the most rewarding part of being a doctor,” Travis said. “Saving someone’s life and having the chance to give them an extra ten years.”
The three brothers have shadowed neurologists and cardiologists in Nebraska and South Dakota. For two months, Jared had a sports medicine internship at Sydney Olympic Park in Australia.
Over Christmas break, the Homan triplets ventured to Tanzania with Hope Ministries. They spent the next few weeks assisting surgeries and teaching seminars to locals.
“People in Tanzania are really, really patient people,” Corey said. “They take things as they come and don’t worry very much. We’d go to a hospital and people would sit on the benches and just wait for one or two whole days to see us. There is no appointment or being late. There is no time.”
During a typical day, they helped provide medicine and healthcare at outreach clinics to tribes without treatment options.
“There was a girl who had an obvious deformity in her ankle that we fixed so now she can get married and work,” Jared says, “Another woman had her hand chopped off by a machete. She’s not going to get her hand back, but we made it so it wasn’t as deformed.”
From their experience, the Homan brothers witnessed the suffering of an entire population.
“The water has so much fluoride that it causes curvature in the bone,” Jared explains, “During one surgery, a boy had two curved legs. The doctor went in, broke them, and straightened them out so the boy can have a normal life.”
But for citizens of the United States, life in Tanzania seems anything but normal.
“Just to give you an idea of how poor it is: we exchanged $100 for 155,000 shillings and you could easily live for a year on that,” Travis said, “One night we stayed at a hotel and someone came and cleaned the doctor’s room. He gave her 5,000 shillings for a tip, which is like $3.25, and she cried.”
Inferior standards of living, poverty and a broken healthcare system make it nearly impossible for people to gain access to adequate treatment for serious problems.
“So many bad things could happen,” Corey said. “Malaria, broken bones… and they are so far behind us in technology. They have more trust and love and faith than we do because they’re challenged every day. When we get sick, we go to a doctor. They can’t. When we went out to a village, that was the only time people could get medical care for seven months.”
Travis and Corey plan to spend the next year gaining experience in the medical field, and have considered working in the emergency room at a Michigan hospital or as phlebotomists who take patient’s blood at a hospital in Nebraska.
“I want to make sure I actually love it before committing the rest of my life to it,” Corey said.
Travis is leaning toward studying anesthesiology. Jared’s heart is set on orthopedic surgery. Corey can’t decide between the two. Although their medical passions vary, their inspiration is rooted in the influence of their trip to Tanzania.
“In Tanzania, the doctor says ‘thank you’ to the patient. If it wasn’t for the patient, doctors wouldn’t be able to support their families,” Travis says. “Their doctors are highly respected, but don’t let it go to their heads. They are thankful for life, rely on God, and remain really humble. I want to be that kind of doctor—the kind that says ‘thank you’ to my patients.”
