Flying Pigs and Traveling Hospitals

I'm getting ready to take on Marathon #8 in Ohio this weekend, the Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon. I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing some runners dressed up as pigs, although I won't be joining them in these festivities. A curly tail has never been a good look for me.

I realize that while I've been building momentum in my motiviation to run more races (I've got 3 more scheduled this fall), one of the more important reasons for doing all these races, to raise money and awareness for some great charities, has been losing steam. So I want to take this opportunity to let you all know the great things that one of these charities, Hospitals for Humanity has been up to.

I spoke recently with the CEO and founder, Segun Ajayi, about what HFH has been up too. They finished off 2010 with monthly trips to Haiti and have shifted their focus to Nigeria for 2011. They have already completed a medical mission in Nigeria just last month in March, and plan to return with missions in August and December. Also on the calendar are missions to the Phillipines in June and Jamaica in September. Part of their missions, in addition to treating those in need, is to assist with education and training of the health care providers in those areas as well as educating the people on preventative care. And these missions seem to be working. With the help of local officials, one of the cities in Nigeria they had previously visited saw a drop in patients from 20,000 to 3,000! This means that more people are getting care from their local providers and are not relying on these medical missions as their source of health care. To me, those numbers are amazing.

One of their latest initiatives is to raise funds for the purchase of mobile healthcare vans. These would, in essence, be mobile clinics that would travel to various parts of Africa providing specialized care, such as OB/gyn, pediatrics, opthalmalogy and some vans would even have surgical suites to do minor surgeries on site. The plan is to purchase three of these vans to start, and they range in cost from $80,000 to $100,000. As you can see with these hefty price tags, this won't happen without help from people like us.

In additon to these great missions and intiatives, they have created a specialized department, the Special Medical Services Department, to focus on individual cases that cannot be addressed by these medical missions. For example, they are currently working with the mother of a small girl in Africa who is in need of a hearing aid. HFH is partnering with a hearing aid company to provide the girl, and others, with these much needed devices and also have plans to send personnel over to fit and adjust the hearing aids. They are also working with Atlanta Medical Center to get a man in east Africa much needed open heart surgery and have found a surgeon who is willing to do the surgery for a fraction of the cost. But they can't accomplish these things without your donations!

Please visit my updated link on the HFH website to make a donation and/or to post some encouraging words for me and the rest of the Race Within US team! www.hospitalsforhumanity.org/index.php/the-race-within-us/

Thanks again for all your support! Look for my all-about-pigs blog post next week!