Don't send "Stuff"

Most of us respond to crises with our best intentions and our best thinking. In the case of disaster relief, however, our best intentions and best thinking can create new disasters. Please read articles here and here and here and great stuff here about the "disasters" of disaster relief from well-intentioned individuals.

That said, there is something that you can do. Fundraise.Fundraise.Fundraise: small or large donations of cash that come from your efforts are desperately needed. Don't start a new non-profit! That takes up a lot of time. Instead, do a really exciting fundraiser and direct donations to the best non-profits. As a church, we don't officially fundraise. But there is no prohibition on fundraising as individuals. Get out there. Partner with your schools for a bake sale. Be the point person for efforts.

Are you saying, "Well, what can we do?" Here are a few ideas (mostly borrowed from other locations and sorry about the formatting.)

• Add links to your blog and MySpace or Facebook pages

• Put together a yard sale

• Create a viral e-mail campaign

• Organize a concert with local musicians

• Hold an auction with items donated by a local business

• Have a bake sale

• Organize a 5K race

• Put together a charity formal, theme party and/or night out at a bar

• Hold a movie night

• Three on three tournament

• Have a dance-a-thon

• Organize a family dance night at your school

• Penny drive

Can you bake bread? repair clothing? design stationary? give a concert? Do you have a band? You can sell your services at a premium with all proceeds going to a particular charity or organization.

What great ideas do you have?

Partners in Health in Haiti

There are many amazing organizations trying to distribute the help desperately needed in Haiti. I receive daily updates from Partners in Health, and wanted to share the latest update from a doctor "on the ground":

ON THE GROUND IN CANGE: FILLED WARDS AND DEDICATED STAFF

01/18/2010

The floor of a nearby church in Cange was quickly converted into a patient ward.		Patients in Cange.

Dr. Jon Crocker is currently working at our hospital in Cange since Sunday, where he emailed us the following report:

We arrived at Cange, in the Central Plateau, the heart of operations for Partners In Health/Zamni Lasante, yesterday. As we expected, things are incredibly busy. People are still arriving from Port-au-Prince. Those who have been fortunate enough to survive their injuries this long are now running into complications of wound infections, some of which have turned septic, and venous blood clots (from immobility and trauma). Patients have completely filled the hospital and we have set up makeshift wards in a nearby church and school. Both surgical and non-surgical personnel are working tirelessly.

Patients are dazed. The disruption to their families and lives is beyond description. Many of our injured patients are not mobile, have few resources, have no home to return to, and many have lost their entire families. We care for their wounds. We listen. We grieve with them.

PIH Women's Health Coordinator Sarah Marsh with a 1-day-old infant who was born on the street in Port-au-Prince.

And yet amidst this darkness, there are rays of hope. Today a one-day-old baby girl was brought in. She was born on the streets of Port-au-Prince with clubbed feet. Her mother suffered lower extremity fractures in the quake and couldn't really move, but labored successfully, lying adjacent to the rubble of her home. The parents were so worried about the baby that the baby’s father made his way to Cange with the child because he knew he could find care here. He did. The baby will be casted and staff here will show how to recast her as she grows.

The Haitian medical staff of Partners In Health/Zamni Lasante and survivors of the quake are working with unimaginable valor and dedication. Many of them have lost members of their own families. And yet they remain here, working tirelessly to provide care for others. They are the true heroes. Those of us fortunate enough to be here to contribute to the immediate relief efforts labor by their side with complete humility. We are in awe of their strength, compassion and dedication.

In solidarity,

Jon

Up until this fall, Dr. Crocker served as Director of Clinical Services at PIH's partner organization in Malawi.

This week the news has been all about Haiti, and there has been very little good news. This morning I opened up the New York Times to read about the violence emerging in Haiti as people become desperate for food and water and aid.

As Jamie has emailed us, we have the only Haitian branch outside of Haiti within our Stake boundaries. They branch leaders are trying to carry out the mission of ministering as they grapple with their own sorrow and distress. Our Weston Humanitarian Group was formed exactly to respond to "disasters" both immediate and distant. While we will have opportunities across the next few months to configure to serve and then reconfigure as the right "action" gets clearer, I am sure that we must find ways to serve the families in our stake who are desperately affected by this terrible crisis. Jamie and Judy Dushku are setting up channels for us to minister and care for sisters and families in our Stake so watch for news from them.

Other things on the table:

• Help families get TSP status: Haitian nationals in the US can apply for TPS (Temporary Protected Status) that will provide them legal work status for 18 months. Many people cannot fill out these forms without help. We might be able to set up times when we help with these forms.
• Organizing a blood drive: the Red Cross is not currently calling for blood, but might and we will help.
• Helping families get phones/cable/internet access to get word from their families in Haiti

Please remember that in times of disaster, scams flourish. You can check out the reputation and validity of an organization asking you for a donation by going to Charity Navigator: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=70 or Charity Watch: http://charitywatch.org/

A couple of news items (and please feel free to update these):

News from the Church about current aid flowing to Haiti--http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705358568/LDS-Church-sending-aid-to-Haitian-survivors.html

From the Red Cross on why cash donations are best:

FAQ:

In response to international disasters, the American Red Cross often experiences an outpouring of generosity from the American people. As long as disasters continue to happen, we know that people will want to find ways to help. In addition to tremendous financial support, we typically receive myriad offers of product from individuals and community groups. ...

Though unsolicited offers of goods and services from individuals and community groups are well intentioned, they have hidden costs and pose a number of complications for relief efforts. ...

Why does the Red Cross discourage donations of collected goods and individual items for disaster relief?

· The cost of processing and transporting these types of donations often outweighs the cost of the donated items themselves. Donations of collected goods require time, money and personnel to accept, clean, sort and distribute them.

· The influx of unsolicited donations distracts relief workers on site from critical emergency response activities – feeding and sheltering the affected population.

· In addition, because we cannot anticipate what these spontaneous donations of collected of items will include, we cannot ensure that the donated products will be appropriate for the relief effort or that there will be enough of a particular item to distribute them equitably.

· Shipping donated goods is costly and particularly difficult in the aftermath of a disaster. Routes into disaster sites are often damaged or impassable and can be clogged easily with shipments of non-priority items.

· The Red Cross makes every attempt to procure items locally, which minimizes transportation and storage expenses. By procuring goods locally, the American Red Cross can also ensure the items distributed to disaster victims are appropriate for the culture and diet.

Update from Partners in Health:

ince Tuesday evening, PIH staff has been working around the clock to bring relief to the people of Haiti who are suffering immensely in the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake. You have seen the images on the news, read the updates on the web, and responded in a profoundly generous way to our calls for help - we are indebted to you for your quick mobilization and generous contributions.

Our team, because of our deep roots in Haiti, was able to be among the first to respond with emergency medical services. Since the first days, our staff has stepped up to take on the challenge of serving the most vulnerable in Port-au-Prince and of providing comprehensive care ranging from basic primary care to complicated surgical services at our sites in the Central Plateau and Artibonite Valley. Co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer wrote yesterday, "We find that years of investment in building a strong local partner organization mean that we are again in the position of responding effectively to a natural disaster. We are very proud of our team."

All of this work-our years of investment and our ability to respond is made possible because of people like you who do not become paralyzed in the face of suffering but rather stand up and help serve.

Yesterday, Dr. Farmer arrived in Port-au-Prince to check in with our team and to meet with Government and UN officials. Since his visit, we have already seen the tide begin to change - this morning, the PIH/Zanmi Lasante team was designated by the World Health Organization to serve as the coordinators of the public hospital, Hopital de l' Universite d'Etat d'Haiti (HUEH), where thousands are suffering in need of medicines and surgeries. In this new role, we will be supporting the administration and staff and recruiting other NGOs to help restore services, particularly triage, nursing, and surgical, at the city's central hospital. Our priority is to increase stock of medicines and supplies, ensure steadily functioning operating rooms, and guarantee sufficient medical staff is available, particularly for nursing care to help with post-op recovery, iv management, and other care that has had to be self managed over the past three days.

With supply chains in place and flights arriving more consistently in Port-au-Prince since the air traffic control has been reinstated, today has already been a turning point in our ability to respond to the enormity of the devastation and really get the field hospitals and public hospitals up and running. We have two planes of surgeons and surgical supplies arriving within hours, we have fuel on its way to Haiti through the DR, and we are reallocating supplies from our ten sites to where they are needed most on a regular basis.

It is clear to us all that relief for Haiti must rely on our collective immediate response and our sustained long-term commitment to building back better. Our approach to health care delivery in resource-poor settings-partnering with the public sector, employing locally, and investing for the long-term-is a key part of the solution for Haiti now and in the future. We hope that you will continue to stand with Haiti now and in the months and years to come.

Back to Blogging - A Series by the BBC

This month we have the opportunity to learn more about infant and maternal health. Dr. Kim Wilson from Harvard Children's Hospital will be our guest speaker on January 31. Dr. Wilson will talk to us about her work, particularly her work in the Dominican Republic.

At our meeting, we will discuss an exciting opportunity that has come to us. April 11-17 is The Week of the Young Child. The Martha Elliott Center, in partnership with Children's Hospital, is looking for ways to support the children and families they serve through some activities and events that would be organized by us. Please bring your ideas for outreach, partnerships, and programs!

The book we are reading is Better, by Atul Gawande. Gawande is my favorite essayist right now. He is a Boston surgeon whose articles The Cost Conundrum, and The Checklist should be required reading for every doctor and every patient. I like all of the essays in Better, but if you read only one, read the essay about immunizing 5 million children in remote villages in India against polio in 72 hours (OK, or some millions--I have loaned out my book). While the immunization success is an amazing testament to diligence and focus, it also illuminates the difficulties of international health care delivery and policy.

I will post links and articles about maternal and infant health through the month. Here is a brief description of the problem from the UNICEF site:

Healthy children needhealthy mothers.

A woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute – about 529,000 each year -- the vast majority of them in developing countries.

A woman in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth, compared to a 1 in 4,000 risk in a developing country – the largest difference between poor and rich countries of any health indicator....

The direct causes of maternal deaths are haemorrhage, infection, obstructed labour, hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, and complications of unsafe abortion. There are birth-related disabilities that affect many more women and go untreated like injuries to pelvic muscles, organs or the spinal cord. At least 20% of the burden of disease in children below the age of 5 is related to poor maternal health and nutrition, as well as quality of care at delivery and during the newborn period. And yearly 8 million babies die before or during delivery or in the first week of life. Further, many children are tragically left motherless each year. These children are 10 times more likely to die within two years of their mothers' death.

Another risk to expectant women is malaria. It can lead to anaemia, which increases the risk for maternal and infant mortality and developmental problems for babies. Nutritional deficiencies contribute to low birth weight and birth defects as well.

Watch for more materials through the month!

--Diane

200 Baby Caps and Counting!

We have started the Humanitarian Group with a Bang! I think that we are at nearly 250 caps, and many blankets (from the Achievement Day girls). What a tremendous effort! And so much fun!

Thanks to Diana Scott for opening her home and welcoming us all there. Thanks to all of you who braved the snow. Thanks to Camille Ebert for providing dessert. Especially, thanks to Amy Sievers who was a terrific first guest-speaker. She makes me wish I were brave enough and smart enough to be her. Her work treating cancer through PIH in Africa is remarkable. I am sorry you could not all meet her.

Again, thanks for the knitting and crocheting and the fellowship of making hats.

"better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try."
— Atul Gawande (Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance)

Alma 37: 6

Now ye may suppose that this is ^afoolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by ^bsmall and simple things are great things brought to pass....

--Diane

More about the Rwanda Initiative

The embedded address by Bill Clinton describes the partnership between the Clinton Foundation and Partners in Health in Rwanda. The speech is long, so if you only want to hear the Rwanda part, you might fast forward to about 16-17 minutes into it. While I found the whole piece very good, his description of transforming the model for delivering quality health care in the most urgent and devastated areas of the world is fascinating. We will definitely want to hear more about this from Amy Sievers.

Enjoy!

A Rumination on Happiness

I have spent the week thinking about "happiness." Whenever I am "on" a topic, I am compelled to read and listen to all I can find about that topic. Accordingly, I have listened to several lectures and read many articles by the best minds in the world on the psychology, the neurology, and the physiology of happiness. It has been a fascinating study this week. This is what I am learning: one of the key features that distinguish humans from animals is the development of our frontal lobe. In that area of our brain, we have the capacity for imagination--particularly the capacity to imagine the future. Unfortunately, we usually imagine it wrong. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert tells us that "We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. " But are our future selves grateful for that effort? No.

Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.

I get this. I am someone who just can't fathom what my earlier self was thinking. As I reap the harvest I carefully and laboriously seeded 20 years ago, I marvel at what matters to me now, and how little I understood my future self.

What does this have to do with happiness (or the Humanitarian blog)? Linking all of the work I have seen this week, I find some "rules" about happiness that I can drag over to think about in my spiritual life. For instance, one key indicator of happiness is our ability to distinguish between things that are "pleasurable" and things that are "meaningful." Activities that bring us pleasure are good, but they have declining value. The first bite of an extraordinary chocolate cake is really the best bite. Pleasure plateaus and diminishes as we continue in that activity. Too much cake, in fact, can cause distress.

This is not true, however, for "meaningful" or "philanthropic" activities. Psychologist Martin Seligman, finds that our happiness increases when we are engaged in philanthropic endeavors. In layman terms: When we do something nice for someone else, we are happier for longer than when we do something nice for ourselves. So, that takes me back to the idea of service, and how service is essential not only to the recipient of my efforts but also to me. What I do for others fundamentally affects my sense of well-being both today and in the future.

I think that there is something to unpack here. When I spend my time on my future, I am planning for a person who will be thankless and spoiled and even frustrated by all of my misguided attention--me. (That's Gilbert's theory.) When I reach out to others and build relationships and experiences of service, I cultivate activities that create long-term meaning and satisfaction. Maybe this is related to the scripture "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

We are a church that believes in service and sacrifice. The Plan of Happiness spoken about by Alma and Mosiah requires our commitment to aid and love and serve others. Our modern prophets reiterate the same message in every Conference. The following is a long excerpt from Jeffrey Holland, taken from a 2006 Conference session. I like to think about this as not only an exhortation to act, but also a promise of peace and happiness.

As sure as the rescue of those in need was the general conference theme of October 1856, so too is it the theme of this conference and last conference and the one to come next spring. It may not be blizzards and frozen-earth burials that we face this conference, but the needy are still out there—the poor and the weary, the discouraged and downhearted, those "[falling] away into [the] forbidden paths" we mentioned earlier, and multitudes who are "kept from the truth because they know not where to find it."⁶ They are all out there with feeble knees, hands that hang down,⁷ and bad weather setting in. They can be rescued only by those who have more and know more and can help more. And don't worry about asking, "Where are they?" They are everywhere, on our right hand and on our left, in our neighborhoods and in the workplace, in every community and county and nation of this world. Take your team and wagon; load it with your love, your testimony, and a spiritual sack of flour; then drive in any direction. The Lord will lead you to those in need if you will but embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ that has been taught in this conference. Open your heart and your hand to those trapped in the twenty-first century's equivalent of Martin's Cove and Devil's Gate. In doing so we honor the Master's repeated plea on behalf of lost sheep and lost coins and lost souls.⁸