Give a Little – Mean a Lot

Share this merde!

This Valentine’s Day, give a true gift of the heart by giving the gift of life – help fund heart surgery for a child. Even $5.00 will help, and you can even donate through Paypal – it doesn’t get much easier than that!

Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian – Dr. Mani to his friends and young patients – is a heart surgeon in India. Through his Dr. Mani Children’s Heart Foundation, he funds – and performs – thousands of heart surgeries, without which his young patients would die.

I personally know Dr. Mani – and many of my friends and colleagues also know, and vouch for, Dr. Mani.

We all donate to his foundation, because, well, we don’t like children dying if they don’t have to, and he saves their lives. It’s as simple as that.

What would you do if your child needed a routine, readily-performed heart surgery – without which they would die – but you couldn’t afford to pay for it?

It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?

But you really can make a difference!

And we guarantee it!

Take our Valentine’s Day challenge – donate something, anything, to Dr. Mani’s heart surgery for children fund – and if at any time, ever, you change your mind, the Internet Patrol will personally refund your full donation – just show us your receipt.

Help us make our goal of $3000 by Valentine’s Day! That’s enough to fund a complete surgery and actually save a child’s life!

Read more, and donate, here:

http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/our-valentines-day-challenge

Give a little, mean a lot

Will Bontrager (http://www.willmaster.com) is someone whom I respect a great deal, for a number of reasons.

So when Will mentioned to me the plight of the Pine Ridge Reservation Lakota people (for those not familiar with this South Dakota reservation, the reservation boundaries and history include Wounded Knee), and urged me to visit the site which has been put together and is being maintained by volunteers in an effort to lend a hand, I of course did just that.

Now, I’ve been on the streets, been penniless, been a single mom, and had to rely on the kindness of strangers, but I have also been very fortunate, and never have I had to experience such bleak and abject, close-to-the bone poverty. And for that I am eternally grateful.

These are real people, real families, real children, real teenagers, for whom a few dollars can make all the difference in the world. As the website will tell you:

“Families live in overcrowded, substandard conditions–no insulation, no central heat. Some sleep on dirt floors. Fifty-nine percent of the homes are substandard. Many don’t have running water and occupants must carry water from the local rivers daily for their needs. Many don’t have sinks with piped-in water, stoves, refrigerators, or heating and plumbing.”

Where do your gifts go?

Well, that’s once of the nice things – one of the main organizers, Pat Perkins, keeps a running list of urgent needs – so that you can donate (they make it easy – donate through PayPal) directly for, say, the single mom who needs heating propane in this blistering cold region, or to the expectant mom who needs baby clothes, or to the senior meal center which needs a working stove so that the seniors can have a warm meal, for goodness sake. The urgent needs page is here:

http://www.pineridgerez.net/urgent.php

The main site is here:

http://www.pineridgerez.net

Go ahead. Make a difference.