May 2013

Dear Friend,

We’re writing to thank you so much for your generous support of Disarm’s work and to update you with some good news about our most-recent steps forward.

Disarm and Global Health Partners are solidifying our merger into one highly effective organization. All our programs are now integrated under one umbrella, Disarm/Global Health Partners, enabling us to better leverage our resources and dramatically expand our lifesaving work. We’re building upon an eight-year partnership where Disarm and GHP worked closely to secure and ship millions of dollars worth of desperately needed medicines and medical supplies, and to develop cutting-edge programs that have brought valuable hands-on training to doctors in Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Through these programs, hundreds of thousands of our neighbors have had access to free healthcare, and we’ve helped change the way each of these countries provides medical services to their most vulnerable populations.

In a nutshell, we’re the same great organization that has been in the forefront of the struggle for peace and social justice for almost four decades, with even more resources at our disposal. Both of us recognize that none of this would have been possible without your generosity and continued support. And for that you have our deepest thanks and appreciation.

Our joint Cuban Medical Project kicked off 2013 by delivering $250,000 worth of desperately needed pediatric medicines to Havana’s Juan Manuel Marquez Children’s Hospital. This year, Disarm/GHP will continue to send millions of dollars in medicines and medical supplies to help bolster a remarkable public health system that is severely constrained by the U.S embargo. While our medical assistance makes a life-and-death difference for millions of Cubans, we’re pushing hard for a complete end a U.S. policy that has imposed pain and suffering on the island for more than five decades.

In Nicaragua, we’re dramatically expanding our support for Los Pipitos, Central America’s largest community-based organization servicing children with disabilities and their families. In May, our latest team from Columbia University’s Occupational Health program will train and share skills with Los Pipitos staff and parents in Managua and rural Ocatal. And in northern Matagalpa, Disarm/GHP is strengthening our partnership with “Skills to Save Lives,” an innovative grassroots program to train midwives, provide skilled prenatal care, and lower the maternal death rate in Nicaragua’s remote rural communities.

And in Haiti, which is still struggling to recover from the 2010 earthquake, we’re stepping up support for the Cuban volunteer medical teams that have been providing essential health care services for millions of Haitians. Last month we shipped yet another 40’ container, filled to the brim with basic medical supplies to address urgent medical needs. We’ve also launched a new partnership with Haiti 155, a nonprofit with offices in New York and Port-au-Prince. This will expedite delivery of our humanitarian donations to Haitian community health workers, while insuring that every donation reaches its intended destination.

As we celebrate the exciting and productive Disarm/GHP merger, and the expansion of our joint projects, we ask that you continue to be part of this dynamic effort by renewing your commitment to our work. This spring we’re planning major new lifesaving shipments to Cuba and Haiti. And while our work is highly efficient and cost-effective, shipping costs are literally going through the roof. We hope we can count on your support once again to help Disarm/Global Health Partners rush urgent shipments of medical aid to our friends in Cuba and Haiti.
I’d also like to offer you, as a valued friend of our organization, the opportunity to travel with Disarm/GHP to Cuba to view the impact of your support first hand. We’re developing new itineraries for travel later this year; unlike our previous donor visits, which focused entirely on public health and our humanitarian work, future trips will provide opportunities to explore a broader range of interests – including art, architecture, music and politics. And we’ll be able to include family and friends! If you’re interested, please take a moment to update your contact information on the enclosed form or on our website, www.disarm.org, and we’ll be in touch with details about itinerary dates, cost and accommodations. It’s our way of saying thanks for all of your generosity and friendship.

We’re so proud to report to you on Disarm/GHP’s accomplishments and plans, which we’ve achieved together. Our Cuban Medical Project is a unique way to save innocent lives, while working at home to overturn an outrageously unjust U.S. policy. We’re not going to give up until the embargo ends.

Please renew your support today with the enclosed form or by going to our secure website, www.disarm.org, to make an immediate gift. We’ll put your donation to work right away to build our joint Disarm/GHP projects, bolstering Havana’s children’s hospitals, supplying Haiti’s shattered communities, training Nicaragua’s rural midwives and partnering with dedicated Los Pipitos staff serving children with disabilities nationwide.

Again, thanks for your commitment and support – we hope we can count on you once again to help Disarm/GHP expand our impact on struggling families and communities!

Gratefully,

Edward Asner & Bob Schwartz

December 4th, 2012

Dear Friend,

I’d like to wish you and your loved ones a joyous holiday season and a happy, healthy New Year. In this season of giving, sharing and bright hopes for the future, I also want to convey my heartfelt thanks for all you’ve done to make this a successful, breakthrough year for Disarm. Our vital programs in Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua are having an unprecedented impact in saving lives and promoting peace and social justice.

With your generosity and support, we have together delivered $2 million in new medical aid to Cuba while raising our many voices against the U.S. embargo. We’ve shipped more than $800,000 in emergency medical supplies to Haiti, into the hands of dedicated Cuban doctors serving communities hardest hit by the 2010 earthquake and ongoing, massive public health crisis.

Now, our shipments to Cuba and Haiti of vital medicine and medical supplies are even more urgent in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Here in the U.S., as we deal with horrific damage and loss of life, we are still working to extend a hand to our battered neighbors in countries confronting terrible destruction with much fewer resources. This disaster completely devastated Cuba’s second-largest city, Santiago de Cuba, and dealt a terrible further blow to Haiti’s suffering communities.

With your support to Disarm’s Cuban Medical Project this year, Cuban surgeons are today performing maxillofacial surgeries on disabled children and adults, using the nearly $1 million in surgical tools we delivered this fall. These instruments, plates and screws were so scarce in Cuba that most maxillofacial surgeries had been postponed over the past year. To get these supplies into Cuban operating rooms, Disarm needed to raise funds to ship this life-changing cargo and turned to friends like you for help. You came through and, thanks to this outpouring of generosity and friendship, our shipment reached Havana on September 12th!

These surgical tools are already in use at two Havana facilities, Calixto Garcia Hospital and Juan Manuel Marquez Pediatric Hospital, that are longtime Disarm partners. “This gift from friends in the U.S. means so much to so many Cuban families,” says Dr. Guillermo Sanchez, Chief of Maxillofacial Surgery at Calixto Garcia. “Imagine the anguish of waiting long months for an operation that will change the life of your loved one.”

Dr. Sanchez, who is also President of the Cuban Association of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, adds that the generous supply of plates and screws will ensure that the doctors on his staff can make maximum use of their skills to benefit their patients, which also include trauma victims and cancer survivors. “Now we don’t have to turn anyone away; we have what we need to make them well.”

Also this year, you enabled Disarm to expand our ‘train the trainers’ project in Nicaragua, where we partner with Los Pipitos, Central America’s largest community-based organization serving children with disabilities and their families. And in northern Nicaragua,
we’ve built a new partnership with “Skills to Save Lives,” an innovative grassroots program to train midwives, provide skilled prenatal care, and lower the maternal death rate in Matagalpa’s remote rural communities.

I know you share my tremendous pride in all we’ve accomplished together, and I’m asking you to join me now in supporting Disarm’s ambitious agenda for the New Year.

We are preparing to mount a vigorous, renewed advocacy campaign to enable all Americans to travel freely to Cuba, while pressing hard for an end, once and for all, to the criminal, irrational and inhumane U.S. embargo against Cuba. Now that the election is over, the right-wing Miami exile community’s outsized political clout will continue to recede. With your support, Disarm is determined to confront the Obama administration and Congress with a broad-based drive to decisively change Washington’s Cuba policy.

In another big step forward this year, Disarm has merged with Global Health Partners, a nonprofit we’ve worked with closely over the past eight years. Our two organizations collaborated to develop cutting-edge programs that have brought valuable hands-on training to doctors in Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Through these programs, tens of thousands of our neighbors have had access to free healthcare, and we’ve helped change the way medical services are provided in each of those countries. By joining forces, we’ll be able to better leverage our resources and dramatically expand our live-saving work. In a nutshell, we’ll be the same great organization that has implemented groundbreaking peace and social justice projects for 38 years, with more resources to work with and leverage for greater impact.

Disarm is now stocking the first of four shipments to Cuba in the New Year of scarce pediatric medicines with a total value of $1.2 million. And we’re turning to you once again for help, to make sure that very sick Cuban children start receiving these vital drugs as soon as possible. In the spirit of human solidarity and holiday season sharing, I hope you will renew your support for Disarm as quickly and generously as you are able. Your gift repudiates the embargo and extends a hand of people-to-people friendship to so many Cuban families.

Disarm delegations that made monitoring trips to Cuba this year met with scores of doctors, nurses, and medical administrators who movingly describe shortages of basic medical supplies and inexpensive medicines that we in the United States take for granted. They met women who are struggling to survive breast cancer that was diagnosed at a late stage – the result of Cuba’s inability to obtain desperately needed diagnostic equipment from U.S. manufacturers.

Our staff has sat with mothers and fathers who are watching as their children die from cancers that would and should be treatable, but for the fact that Cuba is unable to purchase chemotherapy drugs from companies only 90 miles away. Disarm has helped to save the lives of many children with cancer by partnering with the Marquez Pediatric Hospital to supply some of these scarce cancer medicines, along with anti-nausea drugs that enable these young patients to withstand chemotherapy.

In Nicaragua, the Health Ministry views the Matagalpa Safe Motherhood initiative as a pilot project that could be replicated throughout the country. Disarm is working with “Skills to Save Lives” to raise funds to make the project sustainable and effective. Project Director Dorothea Granada says the most pressing need is equip the local midwives and health workers with “birthing packages” that include blood pressure machines, stethoscopes, instructional books, rubber boots, rain ponchos and record journals. We’re committed to raising the funds to build this project that will ensure healthy mothers and newborns for Matagalpa in the New Year.

As our own communities struggle to recover from Hurricane Sandy, I’m asking you to please also spare a thought for our sisters and brothers in Cuba and Haiti. In this holiday season, our help and solidarity is a vital lifeline for our neighbors. Cuba’s second-largest city is in ruins, and Haiti is bearing new suffering on top of incalculable, ongoing loss. Disarm’s Cuban Medical Project will put your gift to immediate use in Cuban hospitals and neighborhoods lacking crucial medicines and equipment, and put lifesaving supplies in the hands of Cuba’s volunteer doctors in Haiti.

Our work is highly efficient and cost-effective: We stock and send our shipments on a shoestring budget, using donated pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, and paying only for shipping and monitoring. Every humanitarian shipment we send saves lives, alleviates pain, and gives hope to a people who have been brutalized by U.S. foreign policy for more than half a century.

“We’ve seen first-hand the enormous contributions Disarm has made to the people of Cuba with its donations of medicines and supplies,” a Disarm Delegation member from San Francisco says. “But we’ve also seen and heard how much more needs to be done. The thought that any man, woman or child is suffering for the lack of very basic medicines horrifies me.” With your generous, tax-deductible support, Disarm’s Cuban Medical Project can expand our efforts to meet that desperate need.

Please make your holiday gift to Disarm now; it’s easy to donate at our secure website, www.disarm.org, or use the enclosed form. Your support is the best way to let the Cuban people know they have caring friends in America, and to tell Washington that it’s time – long past time – to finally end the embargo!

With my deepest thanks and wishes for a brighter, happier New Year,

Edward Asner

$1 Million Worth of Maxillofacial Equipment Arrives at Havana Hospitals

Disarm received a large, critical donation for Cuba this summer: a Los Angeles-based medical supply company contributed a supply – worth nearly $1 million dollars – of plates, screws and instruments necessary for maxillofacial surgery. These tools are so scarce in Cuba that most maxillofacial surgeries for disabled children and adults have been postponed over the past year. To get these supplies into Cuban operating rooms, Disarm needed to raise $34,600 and turned to our supporters for help. They came through and, thanks to this outpouring of generosity and friendship, our shipment reached Havana on September 12!

The surgical tools are already in use at two Havana facilities, Calitxo Garcia Hospital and Juan Manuel Marquez Pediatric Hospital, that are longtime Disarm partners. “This gift from friends in the U.S. means so much to so many Cuban families,” says Dr. Guillermo Sanchez, Chief of Maxillofacial Surgery at Calixto Garcia. “Imagine the anguish of waiting long months for an operation that will change the life of your loved one.” Sanchez, who is also President of the Cuban Association of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, adds that the generous supply of plates and screws will ensure that the doctors on his staff can make maximum use of their skills to benefit their patients, which also include trauma victims and cancer survivors. “Now we don’t have to turn anyone away; we have what we need to make them well.”

Working For Safe Motherhood and Healthy Newborns in Rural Nicaragua

In Matagalpa, a rural region in Nicaragua’s northern mountains pregnancy and childbirth carry great risk, with a persistently high number of preventable maternal deaths. Now, Dorothy Granada, a U.S.-born and –trained nurse who has developed and run innovative rural women’s health projects in Nicaragua since the 1980s, is combating this terrible hardship.

In collaboration with Nicaragua’s Ministry of Health and Disarm, Granada has launched a grassroots “Skills to Save Lives” initiative aimed at training midwives and other community-based health workers to identify and monitor high-risk pregnancies, and ensure safe, sanitary birthing conditions.

The midwives and health workers currently serving these high-risk communities are capable and committed, says Granada, but they’ve received very little training. In many cases, they – like their patients – have limited levels of the literacy needed to access lifesaving information. This project will operate in six-month cycles to institutionalize the knowledge level of local maternal health workers and ensure that women in rural and isolated mountain communities can safely deliver healthy babies.

In this plan, the Health Ministry will select and give special training and evaluation to experienced nurse-mentors who will work directly with Matagalpa’s maternal health workers. Groups of 20 midwives and health workers will receive intensive week-long training, each working with the nurse-mentor who will then direct their months of ongoing practical instruction.

All participants and mentors will attend weekend workshops in Managua at the three- and six-month marks for additional evaluation and training, including women’s health issues such as contraception and domestic violence. “Skills to Save Lives” is also partnering with a rural literacy project to increase the trainees’ reading levels.

In leading this project, Granada draws on years of successful work to develop rural women’s access to health care. In 1990, she joined with the Maria Luisa Ortiz Women’s Cooperative in Mulukuku, a remote area in northwestern Nicaragua, to establish unprecedented traveling “clinics in the mountains” for women and girls. With Granada at the helm, the main Mulukuku clinic grew into a thriving multiservice women’s center that assists survivors of domestic violence and offers literacy training, a revolving loan fund, legal services, and education in exercising human and civil rights.

Granada and the Health Ministry view the Matagalpa initiative as pilot project that could be replicated throughout the country. Disarm is working with “Skills to Save Lives” to raise funds to make the project sustainable and effective. Granada says the most pressing need is equip the local midwives and health workers with “birthing packages” that include blood pressure machines, stethoscopes, instructional books, rubber boots, rain ponchos and record journals. We’re committed to raising $12,000 by Christmas to sustain this project that will ensure healthy mothers and newborns for Matagalpa in the New Year.

Supplies to Care for 5,000 Natural Disaster Victims

In a joint effort, Disarm/Global Health Partners and Direct Relief International (DRI) are providing Nicaragua with innovative, portable hurricane relief kits that will save lives in the natural disasters that frequently strike this Central American country. These Hurricane Preparedness Packs will supply Nicaragua’s national emergency relief agency with more than 9,000 pounds of medicine and medical supplies, enough to care for 5,000 hurricane victims for a month.

Nicaragua will pre-position the supplies, which arrived on June 23, 2012, in health centers, clinics and hospitals in at-risk areas to treat vulnerable people during emergencies. When this year’s hurricane season ends on November 30, any unused supplies will be absorbed into the Nicaraguan Health Ministry’s existing inventory to assure that the resources are used and benefit patient populations. The modules will be replenished with fresh supplies prior to next year’s hurricane season.

The contents of the prep packs are versatile and can be used for acute care as well as to treat patients with chronic diseases should they become displaced by storms and lose access to their medications or medical care. DRI stocks the modules with donations from pharmaceutical and medical corporations.
“This life-saving collaboration between Disarm/GHP, DRI and Nicaragua’s disaster preparedness agency has the potential to save thousands of lives,” says Bob Schwartz, Disarm/GHP’s Executive Director. “These modules enable the Nicaraguan government to respond quickly and effectively to hurricanes or other emergencies. We hope these supplies won’t be needed, but it will be reassuring to the Nicaraguan people to know that major relief resources are at the ready to cope with a natural disaster.”

May Visit “Trains the Trainers,” Empowers Parents

By Rachel Sheskier

This May, Disarm/Global Health Partners sent a group of Occupational Therapy professors and graduate students from Columbia University to teach and exchange knowledge, passion and skills with the staff and parents at Nicaragua’s Los Pipitos foundation. This was the seventh such visit to Los Pipitos, a nongovernmental organization that is is the country’s only network assisting children with neurological, congenital, cognitive and behavioral disabilities.

In a highly productive partnership, Los Pipitos and Disarm/GHP have worked together for nine years to enhance the quality of life for disabled Nicaraguan children and their families. The project focuses on “training the trainers” in advanced techniques and assisting with program development and community education.

The community-based organization serves children at local facilities throughout Nicaragua, and trains their parents to provide ongoing Los Pititos therapies at home. Their goal is to educate and empower these families, with a goal of “Turning Every Home into a Rehab Center.” Los Pipitos serve more than 15,000 families, reaching approximately 75,000 people spread throughout 80 Nicaraguan municipalities.

In past years the Disarm/GHP team worked mainly at Los Pipitos headquarters in Managua, focusing on building the skills of their physical therapists. But this year, we expanded the Columbia group in order to work at two sites. One team remained in Managua to lead focused hands-on training for more experienced therapists, while the other traveled to the northern Nuevas Segovias region to battle torrential downpours and collaborate with dedicated volunteers and therapists at the beautiful new Los Pipitos center in rural Ocotal.

This week of exchanging and developing skills proved to be one of our most successful collaborations to date. The two teams allowed Disarm/GHP to widen its impact by embracing northern Nicaragua’s underserved population, while further strengthening the advanced skill sets of experienced therapists in the capital, at Los Pipitos busiest center. At both locations leaps and bounds were made, with the accomplishments ranging from the adaptation of swings to the proper positioning of a six-year-old girl that enabled her to feed herself for the first time.

This capacity-building project will have a lasting impact. By “training the trainers,” this Disarm/GHP project disseminates vital skills to the broad Los Pipitos network of therapists, volunteers and parents. The success of the two-track visit has sparked discussions on further expanding the project, starting with needs-assessment visits to Los Pipitos sites in southern and eastern Nicaragua.

By Edward Asner

I’m proud to have been a part of Disarm for nearly 20 years. One of my most moving experiences was traveling with Disarm to Cuba — together with former boxing champ Muhammad Ali – to deliver desperately needed cancer medicine to some very sick children at Havana’s leading pediatric hospital. More recently, I’ve been inspired by eyewitness reports from a group of Disarm supporters who visited medical facilities, doctors, nurses, patients, and families that have benefited directly from our Cuban Medical Project.

“The trip provided even small donors like me to feel confident that our contributions were well spent,” one friend from Boston told me. “I was moved by the warmth and appreciation of the Cubans we met; the need for medical supplies and expertise became real, and so did Disarm’s tremendous contribution,” said a friend from San Franscisco.

The Disarm Delegation experienced the essence of our Cuban Medical Project: “It’s important for the Cuban people to know that there are Americans who support Cuba and are against U.S. government policy. It was a privilege to be on this trip,” a longtime supporter from Dubuque, Iowa told me. And I was heartened by this note sent to me by a Disarm supporter from New York: “I had the honor of experiencing first-hand the work of an organization that has made such a visible difference in people’s lives, and was overwhelmed by the gratitude expressed by all the recipients of Disarm’s efforts.”

It’s hugely exhilarating to be involved with a nonprofit that has a really solid track record: in the past 16 years, Disarm has provided $85 million worth of medicine and medical supplies to Cuba, piercing the U.S. embargo with our friendship and solidarity. Now, we have to do even more, as Washington continues to roll back positive steps toward normalizing relations with Cuba.

The inhumane impact of this rollback is evident at Havana’s Calixto Garcia Hospital, where U.S. doctors recruited and sent by Disarm are no longer permitted to share skills with their Cuban counterparts. Washington halted that vital collaboration in 2007, barring U.S. doctors from Cuba’s operating rooms and medical lecture halls. The hospital’s director, Dr. José Basulto, told Disarm’s Delegation, “Forbidding our two countries’ doctors from learning together to save lives is irrational and extremely cruel.”

On this site visit, the Disarm Delegation was able to see the effect of our $250,000 shipment of critical to the Juan Manuel Marquez Hospital, one of Cuba’s leading pediatric facilities. “Seeing is believing,” a Disarm friend from New York told me. “Our visits to hospitals and patients enabled us to truly understand the significance of our contributions to Disarm.”

“We’ve seen first-hand the enormous contributions Disarm has made to the people of Cuba with its donations of medicines and supplies,” a Disarm Delegation member from San Francisco told me. “But we’ve also seen and heard how much more needs to be done. The thought that any man, woman or child is suffering for the lack of very basic medicines horrifies me.”

We’re working to help meet that need. So far this year, Disarm has sent $500,000 in medicine and medical supplies to Cuba, and we’re currently preparing to ship $800,000 worth of maxillofacial surgical plates and screws. The lack of these vital tools had caused a virtual cessation of vital facial reconstruction surgery for accident victims and children with birth defects. This situation makes me very proud to work with Disarm, but deeply disgusted Washington is maintaining – even escalating – an embargo that can determine whether a Cuban child receives a lifesaving operation.