August 2011
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Haiti Mon Amour
Haiti envelops me, embraces me, engulfs me in her unconditional love. And so little I can give back in return.
This was my second trip since the devastating earthquake. Sadly nothing much seems to have changed; people living in the same tents, perilously tilting buildings and broken roadways strewn with garbage and rubble.
I arrived with my dear friend Paul Schellhammer to work on filariasis...
May 2011
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I Left My Heart in Gaza
March 2011 marked my second trip to Palestine with the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF). The first was to Jenin a few years ago.
My dear friend Steve Sosebee, an American and President of PCRF, picked me up from my hotel in Ramallah from where we drove two hours to reach the Israel-Gaza border.
Going through the check point into the kilometre-long wire-fenced walkway, strewn...
July 2010
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April in Haiti
Three months after the 7.0-earthquake hit Haiti, our team of 22 volunteers from Sionfonds for Haiti, made up of nurses, doctors, dentists and a midwife, arrived into the mayhem of Port-au-Prince’s newly built airport with boxes of medical supplies and great enthusiasm.
While attempting to sort our baggage I was delighted to meet two Indian nuns from the Missionaries of Charities in their...
February 2010
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January in India & Bangladesh
Last month was another one of my annual visits to India and Bangladesh to look into our schools, rural development projects and micro credit schemes.
School Visit
Visiting our schools enables us to meet the children, assess their progress and arrange ongoing scholarship support. Above all we emphasize and encourage their focus on the goal of higher studies leading to meaningful self-reliance.
In...
January 2010
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November 2009
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Namaste Bangladesh
Trip report from Josephine…
Namaste, a simple greeting with a profound meaning: “bow down to the supreme-being within.”
It resonates perfectly with the reason we are in Bangladesh, acknowledging the supreme-being within our patients and a belief that each of us has the divine right to receive good medical care. For 4 years, Uncle Sakti has traveled to the remote LAMB hospital,...
October 2009
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World Food Day & Child Hunger
On October 16th the World prepares to celebrate World Food Day. For the first time in history more than one billion people are chronicly hungry - and over 400 million of them are children. Approximately every six seconds a child dies from hunger-related causes.
Just what does it really take to save starving kids around the globe?
Al Jazeera’s Inside Story presenter Sohail Rahman is...
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My annual pilgrimage to the land of my ancestors
Bangladesh, a land of lush verdant fields resplendent with abundant crops, rivers and waterways crowded with Rui, Katla, Hilsa, all kinds of delectable fishes, even the memories make you salivate and crave with desire.
I imagine the boats gliding over the gentle shimmering water transporting or fishing and the boatmen singing with the backdrop of setting sun at the dusk. Nostalgia makes me...
September 2009
5 posts
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WatchFoundation for Freedom TV Interview
“The Foundation for Freedom serves the poverty stricken people around the world by supporting schools in Asia, the Americas and Africa. In this show Community Balance’s host, Suzanne Barnett interviews Dr. Sakti Das and Niall Battson about the Foundation and it’s work establishing schools in India, Latin America and Africa.” —...
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My Painful Musings on the Suffering of the African...
Constantly in pain, incontinent of urine and feces, bearing a heavy burden of sadness in discovering their child stillborn, ashamed of a rank personal offensiveness, abandoned therefore by their husbands, outcasts of society, they live, they exist, without friends and without hope. — Reginald Hamlin & Catherine Nicholson, 1966
Nearly half a century later, that scenario of obstetric...
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“Professor Emeritus of Urology presently working at Alameda County Medical...”
– Foundation for Freedom
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What Would You Like to See Here?