By Albert Santoli | Project Leader
For Mothers Day we are especially focused on our Cancer Treatment for Women and Children program with growing support from outside and inside of the Philippines. We trying to build this program into a widespread international model with an emphasis that extended communities can make a difference in caring for the most underserved and underprivilieged members of societies. We are finding that "small miracles" can happen when people from corporate and private sectors choose to work together. Some people who have been blessed to overcome terminal disease [including program Director Albert Santoli] choose not to hide from life or pursue selfish "bucket lists" but give back to humanity with the support of many wonderful friends and allies. Visual arts, music and psycholical techniques to overcome feart and build a strong positive attitude is now integrated into our holistic treatment program. Please see the attached photos.
Asia America Initiative's program in the Philippines is structured to provide Medical Treatment, Basic Education and Vocational and Art Instruction to impoverished women and children with cancer. Due to extreme poverty, our cancer patientswere presumed to have their lives doomed to pain, suffering and death. Thanks to our donor partners, espcecially the GlobalGiving community the "kindness of strangers" effort is continuing despite a worldwide shortage in production of leukemoia medicines for children and other critical medicines for adults. In the first stage of our GlobalGiving partnership, donors helped us to provide supplemental medical assistance to ongoing treatment programs where 30 women and 20 children -- whose families earn less than $3 per day -- were at risk to have their treatment stopped. That would have placed their survival in serious danger. Thanks to the cancer treatment advocacy organizations in the United Staes and Europe, AAI has provided Tamoxifen chemotherapy medication for breast cancer patients and we have used funds from Global Giving donors to help coivesr the cost of additional supplemental medicines to address debilitating physical side effects and meals and some nutritional needs. All of this at no cost to the patients. We could not succeed without our incredible medical, artistic, educational and psychological volunteers and GlobalGiving members' heartfelt donations that have played a key role in keeping the childen and women, some of whom are mothers of young children, alive and in a healthy emotional and psychological mode.
Dr Jaime Galvez Tan, is the Former Secretary of Health for the Philippines and a reknowned holistic medicine practitioner combining both Western and natural medicines and psycho-therapeutic techniques is AAI's senior medical advisor for our Cancer Treatment Program. He says, "In serious diseases such as cancer, in addition to medicine and competent physicians, the art of healing depends upon a patient -- whether an adult or small child -- to overcome stress and fear by developing a strong will to live and the love that surrounds them. Asia America Initiative's cancer treatment program integrates the joy and hope of arts and education as inspirational compnents in the healing process."
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By Albert Santoli | Project Leader
By Albert Santoli | Project Leader
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