WESTBROOK – Rina Galan, 40, and her son, Jose David Marroguin, 13, grew up in El Salvador, thousands of miles from Westbrook, and neither of them speak English.

But Galan is a mother, and like any mother in any country, she was beside herself with grief and worry when she learned her son had been born with a congenital heart defect, commonly known as a hole in the heart, along with a heart valve problem.

Throughout Jose’s childhood, the family has struggled in the underdeveloped nation to find medicine to treat his complex condition. All the while, the knowledge that, if left untreated, Jose would most likely die of his condition, hung over them.

Now, thanks to efforts by the Westbrook Rotary Club and local donors, Jose will get the surgery at Maine Medical Center in Portland later this week to correct his condition, and give him a chance at a normal life that he and his mother never thought he would have.

“Without that surgery, (Jose) would die,” said Paul Emery, a Westbrook city councilor and club member.

The club found Jose through Gift of Life International, a charity organization that helps find treatment for children suffering from curable diseases and conditions in other countries. Ron Raylman, the organization’s executive director, said this week that Jose’s condition is a common enough birth defect that an estimated 5.5 million, or 1 out of every 100 children worldwide, is born with it.

“It’s a huge, huge issue,” he said.

In the United States, such a condition is treatable with surgery, and has a 99 percent recovery rate, Raylman said, but an estimated 94 percent of children with this condition are born in countries that don’t have the medical facilities to treat it.

“Every day, these kids are dying,” he said.

Emery said he first learned of Gift of Life’s work two years ago, at a Rotary district conference in Portsmouth, N.H., and Emery said the mission struck a chord within him. His own granddaughter, he said, died in 1994 in surgery that was supposed to fix a birth defect.

“I never forgot the death of that granddaughter,” he said.

So Emery set forth trying to find a way to help Gift of Life help other children. In May, the Rotary Club helped Gift of Life find doctors in Portland to treat two young boys from the Dominican Republic who also had heart defects. Jose represents the third child the two charities have been able to help. Both Jose and his mother were flown 7,000 miles to come to Maine for the surgery.

“We’ve never traveled anywhere before,” Galan said through a Spanish translator.

While she and her son have found the whole experience a bit overwhelming, Galan said, it has been a positive experience.

“It’s been going well, and people have been treating me well,” she said.

Raylman said the treatment for all three boys marks the first time Gift of Life has benefited from surgical treatment in Maine, and his organization owes all of it – finding surgeons to perform the surgery, finding a hospital to perform it in and paying for related expenses – to the Westbrook Rotary Club.

“They did all that,” he said.

Emery said the club found a Scarborough surgeon to perform the procedure at Maine Medical Center in Portland. The surgery costs approximately $100,000, but the doctors and hospital staff have donated their time and equipment. The $5,000 raised by the club goes to Gift of Life, which either uses it for incidental, non-medical expenses to the patient and family, or donates it to the hospital as a contribution.

Betsy Richards, who works in corporate business communications and community relations for Idexx, said the firm has donated a significant amount of the cost for the procedure, and may donate even more soon. For a company that creates veterinary and water quality testing equipment sold worldwide, she said, the decision to donate to this cause was easy.

“Our mission, our purpose is to enhance the health and well-being of pets, people and livestock,” she said.

Richards said she knew Emery through working with the Rotary club in the past.

“I learned through talking to Paul, that we could make the life of Jose David better today,” she said.

Emery said the Rotary Club hopes to continue helping children like Jose who can’t get the medical care they need. Along with working to sponsor more children, Emery said, he is also interested in raising money for Gift of Life’s second purpose: to teach doctors in third-world countries how to perform complex surgical procedures themselves, so children like Jose can get critical medical care at home.

Ideally, Emery said, he and various Rotary clubs in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts would be able to raise $25,000 to send a team of 10 doctors to El Salvador for a nine-day trip, where they would instruct doctors and surgeons there.

“For a country to be able to take care of its own, it’s a wonderful thing,” Emery said.

That would be good news to Galan, who said her son is not alone in needing care.

“There are a lot of kids waiting for help,” she said.

Emery said his personal goal is to see that the Westbrook Rotary Club sponsors 100 children.

“If I can help other parents to avoid going through all that agony and pain, in a way I’m helping my daughter, and the memory of my granddaughter,” he said.

City Councilor and Westbrook Rotary Club member Paul Emery, left, shared lunch Tuesday with Rina Galan, 40, and her son, Jose David Marroguin, 13, of Sonsonate, El Salvador, at the Westbrook Vocational Center. The club has helped arrange for Jose to get lifesaving open-heart surgery at Maine Medical Center in Portland later this week. The surgery is possible thanks to donations from a number of sources, including Idexx Laboratories. Representing the company, at right, is Betsy Richards.