Third-quarter beneficiary The Mountain Fund recently led a successful medical trek to Nepal. Here's their account of the experience:  

This spring, The Mountain Fund took another amazing and diverse group of people from all over the world on a medical trek through the Rasuwa District of Nepal, where we have been working for the last 10 years. We had members from Canada, the US, Sweden, the UK, and Germany. While only about half the group was comprised of medical professionals, everybody in the group was fully able to contribute to the needs of the people of Rasuwa. We hosted three medical camps over the course of 10 days seeing close to 700 patients. The busiest member of our group was Pete, an optometrist from Muscatine, Iowa. He diagnosed an 8-year-old with glaucoma and gave some much-needed glasses to a 7-year-old boy who can now really see the world for the first time. Pete, of course, was not the only busy person on the trip--everybody kept busy organizing, seeing patients, and giving out medicines.

Third-quarter beneficiary Compassion & Choices is getting some unexpected national attention. Read what their president, Barbara Coombs Lee, had to say about the matter.

Recently Capitol Hill staffers pulled Compassion & Choices into federal politics, suggesting the new administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, should be called before Congress to answer accusations that he is a member or affiliated somehow with C&C. “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of Compassion & Choices?” Something like that.

It’s a new experience for us to occupy the center of a partisan battle. The issues our clients and constituents confront are intensely personal, never political, and certainly not exclusive to people who ally themselves with one political party or another. Our supporters cover the landscape from right-wing libertarian to left-wing progressive. Polls consistently show majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents support end-of-life choice. Among our clients, those naturally averse to government intrusion in their personal decisions are over-represented.

By Sikivu Hutchinson
Editor of blackfemlens.org

Late Saturday afternoon, like clockwork, the street corner preachers on Crenshaw and King Boulevard in South Los Angeles take to the “stage.” Decked out in flowing robes and dreadlocks, they fulminate into their mikes about the universe, God’s will and “unnatural” homosexuals to a motley audience waiting for the next express bus. Members of the Black Israelites, they are part of a long tradition of performative religiosity in urban African American communities. This particular corner of black America is a hotbed of social commerce. Kids who’ve just gotten out of school mingle jubilantly as pedestrians flow past fast food places, mom-and-pop retailers, street vendors, and Jehovah’s Witnesses hawking Watchtower magazines. The Israelites have become a fixture of this street corner’s otherwise shifting tableaux. Exclusively male and virulently sexist and homophobic, they are tolerated in some African American communities in part because of the lingering visceral appeal of Black nationalism.