05-OCT-A-4

 

RESPONSE TO LARRY CONWAY AND THE MMHOF REGARDING SUPPORT OF FORTHCOMING MISSIONS

 

Dear Larry:

 

  Re:  MMHOF requests for Nominees, Mission Schedule, Funding, Supply

 

I have been delighted with your recent note to me that scholarship support may be available upon my recommendation to defray some of the travel costs for selected deserving students who seek to go with me on the African missions.  At some student-organized gatherings (see Oct-A-3 attached) a student-to-student recruitment process has been going on and a flood of new "wannabes" has applied to me for opportunity for missions abroad.

 

  I had always promised them two things with respect to the financing of the trips (see www.gwu.edu/~intmeded)  First:  I will never give you the first dollar for an "all expense paid" trip; but Second, after your good faith best efforts to solicit and accumulate funding for the trip, money will not be the reason you do not go--come to me with what you have been able to do and we will be able to work out the rest.  This fits ideally into this plan and I am grateful for your support.

 

Second I am grateful that you might be able to sponsor an acknowledgment of an MMHOF Medical  Humanitarian Award for exemplary students.  Each year at the "Hooding Ceremony" and graduation of the medical school class of the newly minted MD's, I am happy to see many students who have made a habit of going with  me, some several of them now who have managed to do so each year of their four year association at GWUMC.  The wonderful part about this is that this honor is a selection of their peers, by the fellow students who recognize their charitable instincts and efforts to help their fellow citizens in any environment, comfortable or otherwise.  I would be very happy to institute such an award as a regular and recurring event.

 

Next, I had written to you that I had promised to name an Islamic medical missionary, and withheld the names only to have a select pair of candidates to offer, so that it did not seem as though I was--in the spirit of Washington DC politics at Supreme Court nomination time for an office presumably apolitical, selecting one representative of several species---"one black, one female, one Hispanic, one Jew, one Moslem..." etc through all the artificial barriers that human beings have drawn to discriminate among one common humanity in "special designations."

 

 The other reason I had withheld her name is that she is  recently being proposed for another award though the GWU African Health and Security Center through my hopeful nomination there and I do not yet know the status of that selection.  Edna Adan is the former First Lady of Somaliland, and had later been forced into Army service by the Warlord Said Barre who was one of the reasons for US invasion in the Clinton years, when warlords overthrew the still-unrecognized democratic Somaliland government.  She had a UN role in Europe, from which she has retired, and now is the foreign minister of Somaliland.  She had dedicated the entirety of her UN pension to the support of a hospital she had founded--ironically on the killing field and cemetery of the patriots of the democratic Somaliland after conversion from the British Colony that preceded the state that fell into Civil War with the War Lords of neighboring (and a former Italian colony) Somalia.

 

 This "Edna Adan Maternity Hospital" is in Hargeisa and up and running through her tireless efforts, and is the place I have worked seeing women and children in large numbers along with my medical students from GWUMC.  You can check it out at www.ednaadanhospital.org or may Google the name.  When I had gone to Somaliland, the highest maternal and infant mortality rates on earth were recorded there, but that dubious distinction now goes to Afghanistan, largely because of the recognition given to the unique problems of maternity in Africa along with cultural problems that have given quiet sanction to FGM (female genital mutilation) and VVF and RVF (vesico-vaginal fistula and recto-vaginal fistula from prolonged unattended labor complications--see subsequent article I am emailing you in a second email from a New York Times recent article or through a book "Hospital by the River" from Addis Ababa where I have visited.)

 

  For these reasons I withheld her name as a third nominee, but not her institution this time around.  You might also consider the Dutchman listed in the forthcoming NYT article I am sending who toils among the women afflicted by this problem (the woman whom I worked with in Ethiopia has achieved lots of recent recognition from institutions that range from the American College of Surgeons Honorary Fellowship to a far more profitable appearance on "Oprah" that netted her millions of dollars in funding support.)

 

I might be able to help you by "loading the hopper" with names for further "vetting" and  for future consideration with her and a number of others including further names I had been incubating such as Harold Adolph.  Harold you may know who is in retirement from mission hospital construction and operating in Niger, Ethiopia and Kenya and is now recruiting a new generation of medical missionary physicians.  A fruitful source of potential nominees world-wide might be a review of the contributors to my book released at the February convening of the MMHOF "Surgery and Healing in the Developing World." (see contributors in 05-March-B-5 attached.)  I am delighted that nurses may be represented since I have met and would like to propose some of these heroines in the future for the MMHOF honor.

 

On the subject of medical supplies, journals and books, you may be aware that I have re-designed my home and added an addition, one component of which is a "medical mission stores support."  I have been collecting donations of drugs, equipment and expendable supplies such as suture, surgical instruments and to a limited extent, recent journals in the packs I am storing up for each mission.  Each time a mission is being planned, the student participants come over and are oriented through an introduction in a photo familiarization from prior travels to the destination, and help in the acculturation from language to climate and assistance in what to pack for themselves in a single bag.  The other two bags they will carry and check in are dedicated to the mission and make a one-way trip for supplying not only the needs of our mission but to leave behind when we have instructed a follow-up cadre of health-empowered individuals (not always graduate doctors) to keep the ongoing mission sustainable.

 

  I am over-stocked just now due to generosity of a few dedicated donors, and lest any of the stock becomes outdated, I might like to have it forwarded to or through you, and we might alternate donor supply systems to keep them fresh.  You are the master of such organizational details and I would be delighted to participate in any system that gets these supplies maximally used efficiently for minimum wastage.

 

I have forwarded to Susan through your request the tentative listing of the next twelve month's missions (05-Sep-B-8) and have also sent you (below) Rick Hodes' address while awaiting Jill Seaman's requested preferred address as she is in transit just now in Kenya awaiting clearance back in to Sudan

 

I hope this letter is responsive to the number of your requests of me that may have slipped in when I was inaccessible in the Hurricane Katrina relief mission efforts.  You will be happy to note that after a stutter start in which our mission was re-organized as "Operation Lifeline" under circumstances described as "austere" without electrical power or potable water (routine in many of my international missions but "shocking" to some of the first-world first-time relief volunteers) we were able to treat over  6,000 patients (not counting the many more we supplied with food, bottled water, ice and clothing)  from our standing start as the "first team on the ground in action" in Jefferson Parish Louisiana on the Mississippi River bank with the flooded skyline of New Orleans in view during our operations (05-Sep-B-5).  Many of these encounters bridged medical, social, economic and religious disparities as well (05-Sep-A-15.)  Perhaps a number of those volunteers might have a continuing concern for helping others still worse off than The Gulf Coast victims that touched American hearts.

 

Cheers!

 

GWG

 

>>> "Rick Hodes" <rickhodes@hotmail.com> 9/29/2005 3:58 PM >>>

c/o AJJDC, 711 3rd Avenue, 10th floor, NY, NY 10017.

 

my address here is PO Box 7600, Addis Ababa.

 

NY address may be better, they can track me down better.

 

best wishes,

 

rick

 

 

>From: "Glenn Geelhoed" <msdgwg@gwumc.edu>

>To: <rickhodes@hotmail.com>,<ajdc@telecom.net.et>

>Subject: I hope you and the gang are doing well!

>Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 14:20:09 -0400

> 

>Could you send me a preferred postal address?

> 

>GWG