Rev. Danny Fisher

This via MahaSangha News:  The Surmang Foundation has been added to Oprah’s Angel Network.   

The founder is Lee Weingrad, a student of the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who writes about the mission of the organization:

According to WHO, the greatest killer of children from birth to 2 years in the developing world is not HIV/AIDS, but dehydration caused by diarrhea. Likewise in the same region last year, over 500,000 women died from complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Most of these deaths are from hemorrhaging.

In Surmang, one in 15 mothers will die from complications due to pregnancy or childbirth. This is twice the mortality risk to a US soldier in Iraq and 30 times the risk to a US mother-to-be.

These are preventable and curable diseases, cures that don’t involve expensive drug regimes, nor billion dollar budgets. Yet there is no high-profile group of rock stars, nor bracelets or mass rallies for this cause.

Nowhere is this crisis more prevalent than among the ultra-poor of China – those earning less than US14¢/day. And nowhere is it more invisible. Yet it is preventable.

In this remote arena, Surmang Foundation has run a quality care, pro-active health center in an ethnic Tibetan region of Qinghai Province, China since 1992.

Our patients are nomads, farmers and monastics and the Surmang clinic has treated over 100,000 of them for free in the past 10 years. Including medicine.

We believe we’ve created a model for rural health care, a model that can be replicated in many other places regardless of language, literacy or natural barriers. The clinic seeks to contribute to a sustainable solution to the health care crisis in rural China, giving the ultra-poor similar access to health care services as their urban cousins. Services contributed by their own people.

Find out more at their official website.