10/15/2016
TOP 10 REASONS to DONATE to HCVI TODAY!
1. It’s my 50th Birthday and I am away from friends and family doing volunteer work in Cambodia. The thing I would MOST appreciate from any of you to help celebrate a half century (s**t I cannot believe this) of living is to MAKE A FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTION to SUPPORT HCVI TODAY. As most of you know, I have poured my heart and soul and drained my bank account getting HCVI to where it is today. In addition, I work over 1500 volunteer hours per year. It is not so much out of love (I would rather be on the beach in Bali than in the office on a Saturday night) but rather from a sense of gratitude and responsibility after having been blessed by so much in my life. Most of us would be picking beans or slaving in a clothing factory if not for the sheer luck of having been born in a country of opportunity and enormous wealth like the US.
2. It is a Saturday night, I am still at work at, I dislocated my hip again 3 days ago - 3rd time in 3 months - and stopped work for only 1 hour to have it reduced under general anesthesia (good story to follow later this week…) and am just completing my 4th 80+hour week here in Cambodia. I will be going out later with local friends and am assuming no responsibility for the possible level of intoxication, however.
3. I survived a near fatal car accident that destroyed my body (I struggle to walk up stairs, put on socks and shoes, and will never run again, and for those of you who know me I think you would hardly have characterized me as sedentary - so a huge loss and major life change) but I hardly ever complain and work my ass off to remain a contributing member of society - that is due some props, right?
4. HCVI is doing amazing stuff. We are a very young organization - only opened in January of 2014 - but are doing projects that have National and Global impact. We are leveraging technology in ways I could not have imagined a few years ago to create incredible impact in the areas where we serve.
5. We have a very small team (6 full time staff in Cambodia) but operate with incredible levels of efficiency and at extremely low operational costs. And we do a lot. We are co-managing and have renovated close to half of the departments of the National Pediatric Hospital of Cambodia. We are taking departments paperless in a hospital that had no wifi in December 2014, using Google Drive and Apps. We donated over $250,000 of equipment and supplies in addition to multiple capacity building projects this past few weeks. The operating rooms at the hospital have been modernized, computerized, and renovated to honestly top US level standards. We do regular community outreach missions. As an example, we currently provide dental hygiene education and toothbrushes and toothpaste to over 2500 children and the program is rapidly expanding. We have just recently taken over management of the National Clubfoot Program. Blood Donor International (our daughter organization) is working to help solve Cambodia’s shortage of donated, banked blood. And this is just Cambodia. We have projects at earlier stages of development in Nicaragua, Haiti, Kenya, and Guinea Equatorial at the moment as well.
6. Our projects achieve levels of excellence by 1st world standards in some of the poorest and most needy locations globally. We just opened the Kids Care Clinic after partnership 10 days earlier with an NGO called Restaurant for Children of the Street, who feed between 300-500 homeless street children daily. This included construction and equipping the clinic. We opened Thursday screening 117 children for height/weight/BMI/nutritional status, full vital signs including pulse oximetry, anemia screen/hemoglobin level using non-invasive (no blood) equipment from MASIMO, general physical exam, hernia screening, vision screening, dental screening and administered GI anti-parasite treatment to all. This was done in 3 hours and it was done with volunteer Cambodian medical, dental, and nursing students with only myself and 2 trained nurses supervising. That is under 2 minutes per patient for all this to be done. We used Google forms and 10 seconds after hitting SEND on the last patient we had a full database with Google analysis and representative charts. We have registered close to 400 children already for the clinic with identifying photos and have established comprehensive electronic records for free having developed our own native EHR using Google technology. We have digital stethoscopes and otoscopes that allow me to examine patients and supervise trainees from anywhere in the world from my smartphone.
7. The HCVI Medical Library was built in 16 days at the end of 2014, including installing wifi throughout the entire National Pediatric Hospital of Cambodia. In the first 20 months of operations (beginning in January of 2015) we have acquired over 5800 Cambodian doctors and nurses as members, have logged over 44,000 individual visits, and we conduct > 2000 training courses, lectures, and conferences per year. The Library operates at no charge to its users. Medical students from France, Belgium, and Germany have recently commented we run a more advanced library than their medical school and there is nothing that remotely compares to the our library in Cambodia. We are closely involved with the medical and nursing training programs for the country.
8.We are now partnered with Harvard/MGH, GW University, and Tufts (and soon Georgetown) with training abroad programs to take place under HCVI in settings where we work globally. We are also partnered with the WHO. Not bad company for you to be joining in support of HCVI.
9. We are DESPERATELY in need of funding to support current and an ever growing number of projects globally (we are looking for both medical and non-medical volunteers as well).
10. You have my promise that your money will be extremely well spent and that the contribution you make will achieve impact beyond your imagination. A friend of mine, Shawn Lucas, recently passed away and he posted on his FB page for his birthday shortly before this tragically occurred, that the only thing he wanted for his birthday was for his friends and acquaintances to do something for others. It made me think to do this TOP 10 List. This would be the BEST 50th BIRTHDAY GIFT YOU COULD GIVE ME.
PLEASE DONATE TODAY!
http://www.healthcarevolunteersinternational.org/donate.html
Donate Health Care Volunteers International continues to grow and serve increasingly larger numbers of individuals in need around the globe. We provide much needed patient care, education and training of health care providers, as well as capacity building. We rely on the financial support of intere...
