E-mail today from Theresa, the office manager in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Albany Medical College:
Hello,
I received a phone call from Dr. Bob P yesterday with a request for help and I'm asking each of you in the small chance that one of you can help or may have some ideas for Bob. Dr. Bob will be leaving next week on another trip to Africa with a group of AMC medical students. To date he has taken countless AMC medical students with him on 21 medical missions. When our students travel with Bob, they are 100% responsible for the cost of their trip. One third year student, Oteng W, is from a village very near where Dr. Bob is going with his group this year. Many of Oteng's family is still living in this village and he was very excited about the opportunity to be part of this medical team and have the opportunity to help his village and family. Dr. Bob was also very excited to have a student who was from that area and felt it would be a great learning experience for the rest of the medical students to have Oteng be a part of their team. Unfortunately, Oteng's financial support fell through just this week and he no longer has any funding for his travel. Bob did not want to take the chance of Oteng not being able to go and put the airline ticket on his own credit card. For those of us familiar with Bob, we all know he does not have $1,500 to cover a student's travel. His response was typical Bob, "This is a gift I can give to Africa and to our medical school – it's worth it no matter how much it costs." So………….I asking anyone and everyone who knows of Bob and his work with our medical students to try and come up with any way we can help reimburse him for the cost of this airline ticket. I don't know if there are any funds that can help support a medical student – but if we find a little bit of money from a few different sources, it could lessen the financial burden on Bob. If you know of any funding or agency that might be able to help Dr. Bob, please let me know as soon as possible. His team flies to Africa on the 17th of January.
Bob and I were calssmates in medical school. He is a guy who has given his life to serving the community – and he continue to make enormous personal sacrifices so that he can meet the needs of others. Click the button below to send Bob money via paypal so that he's not spending $1500 of his own money to send this student to Africa. I'll forward the cash to Bob.
What a very nice idea!