Summer Missions Reflections
On these pages are the thoughts and feelings of team members before and after each mission trip. Presented here as witnesses to the power of Love.
Changing Lives, one at a time!
What's New:
October 2014
2015 Emergency Medicine Symposium.
The next EM Symposium will be held from March 9-13, 2015 in Ha Long Bay. The focus will be on Stroke Care.. There will be 3 conferences: Leadership, Physician Symposium, Nursing. For more information please contact us here.
Current News:
October 2014
"For The Love of a Child" 2014
The Annual Benefit Dinner for the Children of Vietnam will be held on October 25, 2015 at Riverside Community Hospital in Riverside, CA. Purchase your tickets HERE
Alpha Doan - Team 2011
One morning three summers ago I was having a nice cup of coffee at the front lobby of a small hotel in Saigon minding my own business, thinking how to best spend the day. There happened a rather noisy quarrel at the front desk not far behind me, half in English, half in Vietnamese and half in Korean. Finally the receptionist came ask me to help translate. The story was rather straight forward. The Korean middle-aged man and the young Vietnamese girl had just married the day before. The Korean gentleman wanted to pay the bride's brother $5000 only after his sister and himself got through the security barricade at Tan Son Nhat airport on their way to Seoul. The brother needed to catch the bus back to his village in Camau in the late morning and he was afraid of going to the airport. A quick assessment led me to tell the young Vietnamese man to get on the taxi to the airport with the couple since he had no other choice if he wanted that money. I just wanted to get back to my morning cup of coffee. Quick.
Later that day, the receptionist told me the real story and it was anything but straight forward. They were not brother and sister, but father and mother of a child with congenital heart defect which required surgery, which would cost three to five thousand dollars. This couple from Camau together made $100 a month at best. That young mother probably had never set foot to Saigon, much less Seoul, Busan or Incheon. For $5000, she had no choice but. What a suffering a young couple went through. For the love of a child.
By pure accident I was invited to Dr. Doan's "For the love of a child" fund raising dinner last October. As I listened to Dr. Doan's going over what his organization has accomplished in Vietna, how many life long burdens or shames were lifted, how many new looks on life were created, how many broken hearts were repaired, the fight that morning at that hotel in Saigon flashed back in my mind. I knew what I really wanted to do then. Join GSMDM at least for one time. One trip. Help raise fund to cover one surgery. It's not just repairing a broken heart. There might be an outside chance that I am part of a team that brings something way beyond medical treatment to the poor people of my homeland. It's called love. It's called human dignity.