… and how you can, too.
I received this email late on Saturday from Lee Kagan, our personal physician and longtime friend:
Dear Friends:
The photo below was taken today (Saturday, Jan. 16) at the hospital in Jimani, Dominican Republic, where a medical team from the International Medical Alliance (www.imaonline.org) is now working. The town sits an hour east of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, right on the frontier. Refugees fleeing the chaos in the Haitian capital are streaming over the border into Jimani. Doctors with the IMA who are there describe Haitians with crush injuries arriving at the hospital in the backs of dump trucks. The hospital and medical personnel are overwhelmed. This poor rural community where IMA has operated clinics for the past twelve years is now at the epicenter of an emerging refugee crisis. The situation is becoming desperate.
Patty and I have worked with the IMA in Jimani annually for the past two years. The people who run the IMA are the same folks we worked with in NOLA after Katrina. They have operated ongoing clinics for years in Kenya, the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, and elsewhere. There dedication is inspiring. Every dime donated to IMA goes straight to patient care. There is essentially no overhead, no paid staff.
You all look at the news. I don’t have to tell you how desperate the situation in Haiti is. Please consider making a donation to the International Medical Alliance to support the work they do. If you’re looking for an organization that will put your charitable dollars directly to work helping those in need we can tell you that this one does just that. You can donate right on line at their website. (www.imaonline.org) or send a check to the address posted at the site. The website also has some moving photos and written accounts of what they are up against in Jimani.
We are going back to the DR/Haiti frontier next month with an IMA team including students and faculty from the Mayo Clinic Medical School. We are also strongly considering making an additional, earlier trip (in about a week) to join our friends and colleagues who are already there hard at work. We’ll let you know our plans.
Thank you for your support. Our best to you all.
Lee and Patty
