April 5, 2022
Dr. Peter Morgan, a Chiropractor out of Washington Heights, is on a mission from God. In his book Mission Chiropractic he explains how a lucid dream started him off on a spiritual path of teaching and treating thousands of people in some of the World’s most under-resourced locales. But his missionary journey began, oddly enough, right here on the island of Manhattan before redirecting to another one called Hispaniola.
In the months following the attacks on 9/11, a cadre of healthcare providers including Peter, pulled countless shifts at Ground Zero, tending to exhausted rescue and recovery workers. There was something about freely giving away his gift of healing that appealed to him, and in 2002 he founded Chiromissions to organize chiropractic mission trips. In 2010 he launched Mission Life International Foundation, a charitable org that operates an orphanage and birthing center.
He credits Mother Teresa as a powerful example of how to be a good person. She believed that God will judge us by how we loved, and how much compassion we had for, our brothers and sisters in need. She also said that God comes to us in the “distressing disguise of the Poor.” Ever since that mission to Ground Zero he’s been organizing chiropractic missions, primarily to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Over the years he’s organized more than a hundred trips to serve chiropractic to those in need. He continues to lead from four to eight mission trips of chiropractic humanitarians every year.
Along the way he helped the people of Haiti recover from the powerful earthquake in 2010 that took the lives of a quarter million Haitians and injured even more. In the months that followed, thirst, hunger and disease combined with wrecked homes and victims trapped under tons of rubble to create a Hellscape of human suffering that no one who wasn’t there at the time can comprehend. Peter had just left Haiti the day before it struck and he was back there two days later, providing water purification devices and tents.
We caught up with Peter and his current chiromission at their base camp on the Haitian border in Dajabon, Dominican Republic last week. He and a group of students were about to head across the line to visit the birthing center in Haiti where they serve chiropractic to mothers and babies, including newborns. It was their last full day of work and most of them would be going home the next day. A party was planned for later that evening. Mariah C. a DC student from Georgia, told the Gazette that the experience left her feeling very grateful. “I’m thankful every day. People have it worse than me.”
The base camp is a very unusual place in its own right: the Hotel Codevi straddles the border with an entrance in each country. Here’s how Peter explains it. “We officially start at the hotel in the Dominican Republic, where we serve for five days…We then travel about half a mile and cross the border into Haiti, where we have our passports stamped and are officially in Haiti. We go back to the hotel through the Haiti entrance, even going back to our same rooms, but we are now in a different country.”*
Dr. Peter Morgan said the group had adjusted kids in ten schools a day while they were here this time, and there were approximately four hundred kids in each one. He was very enthusiastic about the birthing center across the border in Ouanaminthe, where they also provide prenatal care and train midwives. We look forward to crossing paths again with this fascinating missionary of chiropractic on the island of Manhattan…or perhaps Hispanola.
For more information about MLI and Chiromissions, including how you can support their work, click here.
* From The Five Day Missionary by Peter Morgan DC, pp 75-76.
