From Chapter 4 of my book, "Mythomania: A Psychodrama." This illustrates one of my sayings, "no good deed in this country goes unpunished." I tried to do good, I really tried.
Chapter 4
On A Mission
Working only two days a week gave me plenty of extra time to do good.
The United States government refused to accept the Rwandan Civil War as a humanitarian crisis until it was almost over in the Summer of 1994. That Spring, Congressman Mel Reynolds of Illinois worked around that problem and recognizing the seriousness of the tragedy, gathered medical equipment and medications and personally brought them to the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire. He asked for donations and by then I had enough connections that I could supply him with a dozen large boxes of supplies. That was the start of my non-profit group, The Medicine Cabinet.
Our two oldest girls, Teri and Ami, were my first volunteers. I would collect samples of medications from clinics and the three of us would repackage the meds into pill bottles, label the bottles, and then put them into shipping boxes. We also repackaged any equipment I could scrounge. Hospitals are notorious for disposing of perfectly functional used medical equipment and I was more than happy to take their throwaways. As I explain in My Worst Thanksgiving Ever, “Before its unfortunate demise at the hands of the I.R.S. 12 years later, The Medicine Cabinet sent supplies to Mexico, Uganda, Russia, The Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guatemala, and West Virginia. A shipload also went with Senator Paul Simon to Somalia.” The Medicine Cabinet was my baby.
I was also the Medical Director on three mission trips to Mexico. The first two occurred while I was still married to Cookie and were sponsored by St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church of Barrington, Illinois. The clinics were in Isleta and San Ysidro, Mexico and we served the poorest of the poor. Some of my patients walked 40 miles to get to the clinics.
We knew that getting medical equipment and medications into Mexico was risky because some of the Mexican border guards would seize supplies and sell them on the black market. So, every morning at our home base in El Paso we would hide whatever we could under the seats of the vans before departing for Mexico. I would put a leg splint on my right leg and carry crutches, trying to fool the guards into thinking that I needed them. When we returned to the States each afternoon, I was miraculously healed, sans crutches and splint.
Governments are notoriously the biggest obstacles between humanitarians and their good works. It’s not just the corrupt Mexican border guards. The United States has more than its fair share of politicians and bureaucrats who sincerely believe only THEY know what is good for people and damn anyone else. How many people have needlessly suffered and died because of that attitude? Far too many, including some of the poor of Sierra Leone.
I go into more detail about the Sierra Leone fiasco in my book Bridges but the short version is that before we were married, my second wife Angela and I took our son Jonathon, Ami, and Angie’s son Jacob to Washington, D.C. to drop off a load of medications to a man from the consulate of that African country. When we got there, we couldn’t get a hold of him. We didn’t know it at the time but his son ruptured his appendix and the Consul was incommunicado at a hospital in Washington. We tried in vain to reach him for three days and before we left for Wisconsin, we convinced the hotel receptionist to let us leave the boxes there, reassuring her that the Consul would come to pick them up soon. She let us, but forgot to tell her boss. When the manager of the hotel discovered them, he called the police who then called the Drug Enforcement Agency. The D.E.A. confiscated the medications and secured them in a locked compound. There wasn’t a single controlled substance in the lot so it was much ado about nothing. Except that the medications never got to the people of Sierra Leone.
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