By Grainne McKeown | Executive Director
A few weeks ago, I discovered a beautiful children’s book and read it to my son. It’s called What Do You Do With An Idea. It’s the story of a child who has an idea and keeps it close to her heart her whole life. At times she feels burdened by it and wishes she could get rid of it, or abandon it somewhere so that her life could be easier, and more like everyone else's. But that only makes the idea grow bigger. In the end, she embraces her idea and her uniqueness and this idea explodes and finally, instead of her holding the idea, the idea becomes her world. Wow! To me, I saw the idea as the way we see the world. If we see the world as a kind, open, generous, sharing place where we all care for each other (this is how I have always seen the world) and where we are all put on this earth to help one another, then we live that idea; that idea grows and grows and touches others, and eventually it becomes the world around us. So let’s keep our beautiful ideas of the world and goodness, act on them, share them with each other and create a world that embodies those ideas. Our wish is that you can make the world full of your ideas in 2019!
With your help, here is what we have accomplished in 2018 to create the world we want to see:
1. We successfully held our first online fundraiser with all of you generous donors giving over $10,000! We highlighted a different volunteer every other day and the opportunity to look back on the experiences of those volunteers was incredibly uplifting. Rosanna Marshall, now a practitioner with 10 years of experience, was just beginning her practice when she volunteered, working day and night for patients in Nepal, learning a little Nepali along the way, making it through illness and culture shock to be the best acupuncture volunteer our patients could have. Thank you, Rosanna, and thank you to all our amazing volunteers.
2. Our clinic continues to become a presence in the village of Chanaute and becomes more whole with every day. The first floor is being used for patients and part of the second floor is functional as volunteer housing. Work is still being done to finish the second and third floors with electricity, bathrooms, and paint, and more bedrooms are being built out for visiting health care workers. We will continue to support this project until the entire building is complete.
3. We have continued to send volunteers who have been so generous with their time and energy, just so that the people in the village of Chanaute have access to medical care. This year Nicole Ruffalo spent 2 months in Nepal treating 20-30 patients per day, for issues such as debilitating knee pain, stroke, diabetes, and gynecological complications. Nicole was the primary medical practitioner for 15,000 people in the Sindhupulchouk District of Nepal.
To all our donors, you have helped us tremendously in the past, and for this I am eternally grateful. I know there are many organizations and worthy causes that ask for your support and so I am honored that you choose MMW to lend your generosity to. I hope we can count on your support for an end of year donation during the most generous days of the year--the last two days before 2019. Please help us to provide clinic supplies, needles, and herbs to our patients. It will make the world of difference to the people of Chanaute.
We look forward to our ten year anniversary with you and with our patients in Nepal in 2019!
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