Despite 2022’s Dark Moments, Courage and Kindness Shined Through
By Lara Cooper
The war in Ukraine, major hurricanes in Puerto Rico and the US Gulf Coast, and other crises shook 2022 with chaos and destruction. But these events also spurred people and organizations into action to help others.
Courage has taken many forms this year, including a truck driver risking his life to get medical help in Ukraine and a health worker traveling to communities in rural Mississippi that lack health care.
Here are some of their stories.
Impacts on Haiti’s health system can be felt months after a 7.2 earthquake struck the country, and health organizations have continued to reach out to people for care, Talya Meyers reports. “[Medical staff are] crossing rivers, dirt roads, just to make sure they reach people,” said Conor Shapiro, president and CEO of the nonprofit Health Equity International, a group that received a grant from Direct Relief and runs daily mobile clinics in remote communities in southern Haiti, where care is difficult to access.
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Frigid winters in Chicago are not enough to prevent medical workers from the Night Service from reaching people experiencing homelessness. Direct Relief and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Olly Riley-Smith joined The Night Ministry in January as they used their mobile clinic and outreach program to provide critical services to their clients during the dead of Chicago’s winter. The organization received a $250,000 grant to advance its work from the Direct Relief Fund for Health Equity.
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Dobrobut Hospital in Kiev was a for-profit medical facility before the war with Russia broke out in February, but quickly turned to treating patients for free. Direct Relief supported the hospital with $750,000 to pay salaries and buy food for staff members. “We are able to provide free surgical and hospitalization care to our patients in Ukraine, thanks to the generosity of Direct Relief,” Vadim Shekman, Dobrobut COO, told Talya Meyers.
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Save A Child’s Heart is an Israeli non-profit organization started in 1995 by an American that brings children from all over the world to Israel and performs heart surgeries, all for free. Direct Relief provided Save a Child’s Heart with a $100,000 Covid-19 grant to support their work, and more than 6,000 children from 63 countries have been treated by SACH, including countries with no formal diplomatic relations with Israel, such as Iraq and Syria, Noah Smith reports.
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Plan A Health brings reproductive health services to Mississippi communities that often lack a brick-and-mortar clinic. The mobile clinic travels to about three destinations a week with Antoinette Roby at the helm. Roby was a truck driver for 10 years before working with Plan A. She studied health care administration at school, which qualified her to be both the manager for the mobile clinic and a community health worker. “I felt like it was bigger than, you know, just me,” Norwood told Direct Relief’s Olivia Lewis. “To be a part of this organization where they go into communities that don’t have a lot of access.”
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Direct Relief’s Noah Smith spoke to 29-year-old Nazar Chorniy, one of the many Ukrainian drivers who transported life-sustaining medication and medical supplies to Ukraine at great personal risk. “It’s very true that there’s always fear, especially when the bombs fall, but understanding why you do it is the reason you can do it,” he said, referring to his aid shipments to Ukrainian cities are under direct attack. “We’re doing it for good, we’re doing it for a very positive reason.”
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Gail Small, whose Northern Cheyenne name is Head Chief Woman, serves as a Health Equity Advisor for Direct Relief. Gail invited Direct Relief to visit her Cheyenne homeland and the Billings Urban Indian Health & Wellness Center in Montana, and in this video talks about the challenges and opportunities unfolding today.
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HOPE Clinic, a federally qualified health center in Houston, Texas, has expanded services to care for recent arrivals from Afghanistan. Children arrived without vaccination records, and some people had never seen a doctor in Afghanistan, Talya Meyers reported. The health center brought a number of skills to the table, such as linguistic and cultural sensitivity. “You could see the fear in their eyes until they got an interpreter, and they just relaxed, and the way you could see them relax was very physical,” recalls Lulu Toumajian, an outreach specialist at HOPE. “Patients are more friendly when it’s their language and their culture, and when their culture is not only accepted but celebrated.”
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Before Hurricane Ian, Premier Mobile Health Services, or PMHS, a free clinic in Fort Myers, Florida, served more than 7,000 patients in 2022 at their physical location and two mobile clinics, Noah Smith of Direct Relief reported. Just after the storm passed, Executive Director Nadine “Deanie” Singh and her team were ready to respond, but soon learned that all of their supplies—medicine and supplies—had been damaged or lost, at a time when the community had the most need. With the help of several nonprofits, including Direct Relief, which provided medical and financial support to the group after the storm, along with other agencies, PMHS was able to partially restock their medications and supplies, as well as an EKG machine, and resuming medical presentations. care.
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When Russia invaded Ukraine last February, it didn’t take Zbigniew Molenda, founder and vice president of Pelion SA, Poland’s largest healthcare sector business, and his colleagues to decide whether or not to respond.
“It was nothing about business. We didn’t think whether to help or not; it was so natural. It was a natural result of so many people needing help. After February 24, a huge flow of people went to Poland came and from the first hour, like many Polish people, we started helping,” he told Noah Smith during an interview at Pelion’s headquarters in Šódź. With funding from Direct Relief, the company administered the Health4Ukraine program , which funded prescription drug co-payments for Ukrainian refugees in Poland for free.
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