The Good Samaritan Fund [GSF] continues to operate very successfully. The fund has been boosted by a donation from the Canadian Friends of Ludhiana and Vellore. The lead administrator of the fund in Ludhiana is Dr. Clarence Samuel, and he and his team make awards of up to 10,000 rupees [£100] to patients who cannot meet their hospital bills. Both children and adults benefit across a wide range of specialities. Many of these admissions relate to an unexpected emergency condition [trauma, medical illness or urgent surgery], and in other instances the patients have suffered an exacerbation of a chronic condition making an expensive stay in hospital necessary. In these instances the families are already coping with the expense of the ongoing condition, for example daily insulin for a diabetic child, and need to borrow money they cannot afford to repay in order to pay for the hospital admission.
The child in the picture is a Rohingya Muslim. This is a community without a country. Their place of origin is Burma (Myanamar) at the border with Bangladesh. Myanamar does not accept them as their citizens and neither does Bangladesh. They do not have a country and are thus illegal refugees in India. This child was Dr. Dhruv Ghosh’s patient and came to the hospital with a perforated intestine and no money. He was operated on and is well. The GSF helped in his treatment as well.
The message from Dhruv is “I hope more and more can come and contribute to this fund, the usefulness of which is immense.”