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Membership Luncheon March 18, 2010
Speaker: David Vanderpool, M.D.
Just back from the Haiti frontlines where he has been providing medicines and other medical equipment to the clinics and hospitals that he builds, David Vanderpool, M.D. will be sharing with us the common factors he sees and responds to in his mission to help devastated regions across the globe from Haiti, Katrina victims along the Mississippi Gulf Coast , Iraq, Israel, Ukraine, China, Peru to Aftrica. Dr. Vanderpool will also be updating us through a pictorial show about his relief efforts in Haiti.
In 2005, as a response to Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Vanderpool formed the Medical Mobile Disaster Relief foundation. MMDR provides medicine and medical supplies to indigent clinics on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. As of October 2006 the foundation has supplied over three tractor trailers of supplies to clinics that would otherwise be closed and unable to treat those in need
Vanderpool’s wife, Laurie and their three children — David, 21, John, 17, and Jacklyn, 14 — have all participated in MMDR work. David, a college student, designed a micro-economic stimulus program for widows in Africia. MMDR provides sewing machines for the widows, who use them to make distinctive native purses that MMDR purchases from them to sell in this country. All profits from the sale of the purses are returned to the widows to buy fabric to make clothes for the more than 800 orphans in their area.
Vanderpool said one of the most touching parts of this cycle is that African women are dumbfounded that American women would want something that they created. MMDR plans to sell the purses at fair trade stores, adding leather tags that tell the story of the community. “It’s amazing how profoundly the lives of these women can be changed by the sale of a purse that required so little effort on our part,” he commented.
