Please help
Vicky, a dear WP friend of mine, has just had a terrible family tragedy. She just sent me this email (and gave me the OK to pass it on):
Hi everyone
Normally I would never, ever make a request for donations to a charity that benefited a member of my family, but desperate times call for desperate measures...
http://www.justgiving.com/Casa-Alianza-Emergency
This is my cousin Dan, gorgeous, funny, slightly weird Dan who has spent the last few years working with street children in South America. He came home occasionally with tales of being smuggled in car boots across country borders because a drugs gang wanted to kill him after he took some of their child-workers away to a school. He made a difference, a real difference, and my family is so very proud of him. Stupidly, stupidly, he dived into a shallow jungle river in Guatemala on New Year's Day and broke his neck in three places. He has come out of the coma but he can only blink. He is not expected to improve. He has indicated to my aunt, who has flown to be with him in hospital in Bogota, that he is prepared to spend a year like this, and then go to Switzerland to die.
We want Dan home. He is not insured, so we have to find £90,000 to fly him back. Because he cannot breathe for himself, he requires a rare kind of air ambulance that has closely regulated cabin pressure so it won't interfere with his ventilator.
If he dies before we can bring him home, all the money will go to the street children charity for whom he worked. Coffins are so much cheaper to bring back.
I am so sorry to ask you something like this, it goes against all my principles, and I won't be remotely offended if you prefer not to make a donation. But I have to ask everyone I know, do you see?
Vicky
PS. If you want to know more about Dan and are on Facebook, go to HELP DAN for a page of messages from friends and family, plus lots of photos and good memories.
I'd like anyone reading this to think about helping out - I would also be eternally grateful if some of my flist reposted this message and boosted the signal for her.
Thank you.
(This is a real life person who I know and trust absolutely. It's a bit sad that I feel I need to say that right up front, but... I've seen these things turn bad before, both with people who aren't really in need and people who are.)
Hi everyone
Normally I would never, ever make a request for donations to a charity that benefited a member of my family, but desperate times call for desperate measures...
http://www.justgiving.com/Casa-Alianza-Emergency
This is my cousin Dan, gorgeous, funny, slightly weird Dan who has spent the last few years working with street children in South America. He came home occasionally with tales of being smuggled in car boots across country borders because a drugs gang wanted to kill him after he took some of their child-workers away to a school. He made a difference, a real difference, and my family is so very proud of him. Stupidly, stupidly, he dived into a shallow jungle river in Guatemala on New Year's Day and broke his neck in three places. He has come out of the coma but he can only blink. He is not expected to improve. He has indicated to my aunt, who has flown to be with him in hospital in Bogota, that he is prepared to spend a year like this, and then go to Switzerland to die.
We want Dan home. He is not insured, so we have to find £90,000 to fly him back. Because he cannot breathe for himself, he requires a rare kind of air ambulance that has closely regulated cabin pressure so it won't interfere with his ventilator.
If he dies before we can bring him home, all the money will go to the street children charity for whom he worked. Coffins are so much cheaper to bring back.
I am so sorry to ask you something like this, it goes against all my principles, and I won't be remotely offended if you prefer not to make a donation. But I have to ask everyone I know, do you see?
Vicky
PS. If you want to know more about Dan and are on Facebook, go to HELP DAN for a page of messages from friends and family, plus lots of photos and good memories.
I'd like anyone reading this to think about helping out - I would also be eternally grateful if some of my flist reposted this message and boosted the signal for her.
Thank you.
(This is a real life person who I know and trust absolutely. It's a bit sad that I feel I need to say that right up front, but... I've seen these things turn bad before, both with people who aren't really in need and people who are.)