Fernando Fonseca
«Only the battle that who you abandon is lost»
– Dr. FERNANDO FONSECA BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Fernando Fonseca Máñez (Caspe 1946-Barcelona 2014) Orthopedic surgeon, offered his hands and his heart to the most disadvantaged children on the planet, choosing humanism as his flag and cooperation as his vocation.
He spent his childhood in Morocco and there he met a Berber boy, Ali. This became his first friend. They played a lot but life showed them its hardness. Ali fell ill at the age of 6 and the situation of family poverty prevented him from accessing hospital medicine and he died. Fernando, despite his youth, decides that he will be the doctor for the poor children. From that moment he dedicates his life to practicing as a surgeon curing and caring for “Alís” from all over the world.
Medicine and Cooperation
A lover of cinema, at the age of 17 he discovers in Akiro Kurosawa’s film “Barbarossa” the doctor he wants to be.
In Barcelona he specializes in orthopedic surgery and traumatology, in Paris in microsurgery and in Legnano, Italy, in hand surgery. All this baggage allows him to care for and heal: burned children, war wounded, amputees, the severely disabled and pathologies derived from extreme poverty.
At the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, he began his work to raise awareness of the most vulnerable in the system and during his time as a young resident at the Public Hospital of Girona, he demonstrated his determined character, choosing this city to reside in and from where he began his active cooperation as a war surgeon with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Bosnia and Afghanistan.
Being president of Doctors of the World (MDM) of Catalonia, he participates in concrete actions in Iraq, Morocco, Chad and Sri Lanka among other countries.


From his Medical Office in Girona, he created the Humanitarian Association of Solidarity (AHS) which allows him to organize his own humanitarian expeditions in Africa, India, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Darfud, Cuba and Senegal.
In Barcelona, he develops a great activity in favor of the health of the socially excluded; prostitution, prison, migration and exile. He also participates in awareness programs in schools and universities through conferences, courses and congresses, as well as interviews on radio and television.
As of 2005 he chooses Barcelona as his place of residence, transferring the logistics and coordination work of all his cooperation activities to the Catalan capital until his death.

Humanitarian Actions
For 19 years he traveled to the Republic of Chad to collaborate with Father
Michel Gimbaud at the "Notre Dame De Paix" Center for the Disabled in Moundou, in southern Chad, where he treats children with sequelae of poliomyelitis, deformities of arms and legs burned or lost by the mines.
He participates in 20 surgical expeditions, the first six at the Bebalem hospital with 193 beneficiaries, the remaining 14 at the Moundou hospital, with some 744 beneficiaries.
In the Dominican Republic, he collaborates for 10 years in poor and marginalized neighborhoods, caring for disabled children with motor problems, offering them surgery, orthopedics and physiotherapy.
In Guatemala, he explores the most inaccessible mountain areas where Mayan communities live, treating disabled children.
In Bangalore, India, he trains technicians at the Vicente Ferrer Foundation hospital, while in Iraq, during the war, he helps rebuild hospitals and follows the progress of wounded children by expatriating them to Barcelona.


His passion for the image leads him to find in audiovisual language the way to express and denounce the effects of war, poverty and social exclusion as well as visually document his expeditions and surgical work.
In 2005 he contacts the filmmaker Fina Sensada, an expert in fiction, and invites her to discover reality in Sri Lanka and make a documentary on medical exploration of the effects of the Tsunami. Time later she becomes his wife.
From that moment on she is responsible for the logistics, coordination and documentation of his humanitarian surgical expeditions and at the same time she is responsible for making a file of surgical interventions and her approach to extreme traumatological pathologies that Fernando proposes to her as producer and surgeon.
Together they create the production company LA i LA Produktions dedicated exclusively to doing awareness-raising work for cinema and TV “Manos que curan y Ojos que miran” until the end of their days.
Some of his documentaries as Producer of him participate in various film festivals around the world.

An endless legacy
His intervention in his brain in 2010 and the disability he acquires to practice as a surgeon in the last 4 years of his life do not prevent him from continuing to cross continents directing surgical expeditions in a wheelchair in Chad and producing a feature film in Venice. Until in July 2014 he makes his last trip to his star.
Dr. Fonseca left this world leaving unfinished the work of monitoring the recovery of 5 children from different continents, Mawj (Iraq), Jose (Dominican Republic), Chanceline (Chad), Bakite (Darfud) and Mano Prieta (Dominican Republic). and the follow-up of specialty training at the hands of his disciple, the young Dr. Djilouba, the first traumatologist in Chad.




