Charity trip to Peru

Some of you might remember my trip in May 2006 to Honduras as a part of a medical mission team. It was a wonderful experience and I've been trying to be a part of another trip since then. Last year, I got that opportunity: Healing the Children asked me if I could go to Peru in October. I jumped at the chance, especially when I was told the trip would be entirely funded by a medical supply company.

Unfortunately, about a month before the trip, this medical company withdrew their funding. You see, there's an irritating man named Andrew Cuomo who is the Attorney General of New York, and as the target for his AG energies, he has chosen to investigate "perks." Oddly enough, this affects me in two ways. First, he is investigating study-abroad program providers and their relationship with study-abroad offices, to determine if the relationship is appropriate. That's a long story for another day. Secondly, and most pertinent to this particular post, Mr. C is investigating medical companies' perks for doctors. I'm sure most of you agree that golf weekends and ski conferences and lavish dinners etc are an excessively wasteful use of patients' overinflated prescription fees. Unfortunately, the broad umbrella of the word "perk" also extends to include charitable donations, like the one intended to pay for our trip. For fear of attracting the unwanted attention of the government goons, our sponsor backed out.

I haven't really thought too much about the specifics of that situation for several months, and now that I write it out...DAMN! that sucks. Especially given the crazy amount of time and energy I am now putting into raising funds for our rescheduled trip, to happen in May.

Our biggest event is this coming Saturday. It's a hors d'oeuvres and wine, fancy-type event with a silent auction. I've never even been to a silent auction before, but now I'm one of two people organizing this. We've gotten donations of some fabulous prizes, if I do say so myself, and we hope to earn a ton of money at the event.

Curious? Check out the auction blog I created: http://htcne-auction.blogspot.com. I'm pretty proud of my work, I must say. We'll see if we actually get any initial bids this way, but at least it's a good way to pique everyone's interest.

Details are included on the site for anyone who is interested in attending the event. If you'd like to help out otherwise; stay tuned, and I'll have more details on that later this week.

P.S. Do you remember that SNL sketch where Chris Farley played Giuliani's son Andrew at the inauguration? Well, for a while I was confused and thought maybe that little kid was Andrew Cuomo. I did some elementary math in my head and realized that Andrew G is probably still in college, and therefore unlikely to have been elected to the highest legislative position in the state of New York.