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
This "
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
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,
my address here is
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