The Turimiquire Foundation and the crisis in Venezuela

Season's Greetings to all of our friends and Foundation supporters! Please help us improve the lives of those who are so much less fortunate. Thanks and best wishes always,
Steven

“When we are dreaming alone,
it is only a dream.
When we are dreaming with others,
it is the beginning of reality.”

–Dom Helder Camara
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This year we re-invented ourselves online to better share our work with you. Please visit our new website, where we show how – with YOUR help – we are delivering vital medical, educational and humanitarian services where no one else is in crisis-stricken Venezuela.

Our goal is to make as much difference as we can in the lives of as many impoverished Venezuelans as we can. Our strong connections in the public and private health sectors allow us to support desperately needed surgeries that, tragically, are only very RARELY AVAILABLE to low-income patients through the public health system anymore.

Luis Oyoque, here dressed in his Sunday best, is from a poor outlying village where he received little support for his severely deformed feet, and could barely wear shoes.

His family brought him to live with his grandmother in one of the sprawling low-income barrios that surround our city of Cumaná. Public health doctors brought him to our attention. While we arranged the surgery, his family in the countryside worked hard to save enough money to pay for his pre and post-operative expenses, including slaughtering a pig to sell the meat the week before surgery.

Luis spent several months immobilized with these pins in his feet. And now look at his feet-- he can walk normally with real shoes on. This is our real bottom line:
Putting smiles on the faces of those who are most disenfranchised.

This year we performed hundreds of reproductive health, orthopedic, pediatric, and other surgeries at an average cost of $200 USD or less per surgery. We can achieve such extraordinary efficiencies thanks to our generous network of support built over many years here.

By far the biggest single demand is for surgical sterilizations, the most popular form of birth control here. Following closely are hernias, especially for rural men and women who lead physically strenuous lives to survive.

This is a marvelous way to improve a life.
Please help us to help many more !!!

Contraceptives are extremely scarce and expensive in Venezuela right now. The supply does not approach the demand, driving the price up and up. We use social marketing to reach as many people as possible, asking for collaborations well below market rates for the contraceptives we offer. Where a pharmacy might seek to make a 30% profit (and on the prevailing black market, up to 200%), we seek to lose about 30% on each contraceptive we offer. That is a 60% spread in price which clients save each month on their birth control, a big difference in this inflationary economy. Some 15% of our contraceptives are supplied free-of-charge to adolescents and low-end clients without the resources to acquire them.

Who makes up the difference in the 30% loss we are taking?
*** YOU DO ***
We thank our donors for bridging this difference so that many more women and families can control their own fertility!

PLEASE MAKE YOUR 2016 CONTRIBUTION HERE, THANK YOU!

OMG, the BRIDGE FELL DOWN !!! On Thursday, September 8th, during the height of the torrential tropical rainy season, after recurring days of flash flooding, the Rio Manzanares swelled once more and swept away several pedestrian suspension bridges that connect the rural communities where we work to the one paved road that goes to town.

Rob Albert, our director of rural programs, watched the river sweep the Barrancas Bridge (above top) away right in front of his house. Read his story here to learn about life in this rural community, what has happened since, and how the Foundation contributes.

STAFF NOTES: We are so proud of Gleiver, our student and now staff, who was selected by the U.S. Embassy in Caracas as one of the 20 best university students in English in our State of Sucre and invited to an all-expense-paid week-long intensive English language "Summer Camp" sponsored by the Embassy in September. Gleiver had a wonderful time, and continues to tutor our rural scholarship students in their English courses here while he finishes university himself. Gleiver also offers classes in English to the doctors and social workers who work with us here at the Foundation, and to their families.

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Your donation is tax deductible, and remember, more than
93 cents of every dollar goes directly into the field!

PayPal is the safe, easy way to donate online.
Click the button, type in the amount
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Donate online!

Please consider making this a recurring monthly donation.
You can do this right on PayPal, and it is a real assist for us.

Or please mail your check,
payable to the Turimiquire Foundation,
to our U.S. office:
Turimiquire Foundation
William Bloomstein
16 Crescent Street
Cambridge, MA, USA 02138

Comments, thoughts, advice?
Email us, we’d love to hear from you!

*** Thank You for Dreaming with Us ***