Dear Friends,
What an incredible journey the past thirteen years have been! With your solid support and participation, SEF has made a tremendous progress – more than 120,000 free eye surgeries will be performed at your eight eye hospitals in India this year. I have been reminiscing about this once in a lifetime journey and am realizing how fortunate we are, to get this opportunity to make a difference and also improve ourselves. We started with our Coimbatore Hospital and progressed to Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Silvassa, Rishikesh and Punjab. What a rich experience! I have learnt so much about our diverse culture, language, arts, thinking and more. I have made so many friends from all over and relish that.
Initially I used to think that I am helping the visually handicapped poor but slowly it dawned on me that my outlook on life is changing and am surely becoming a more positive and confident person. We are benefiting a lot more than the visually handicapped poor from this good work. I have stopped generalizing and am realizing that every individual is unique and basically divine with an unlimited potential to do good. We are all part of this existence and we are connected. The pain of a visually handicapped poor is our pain and we benefit from doing something about it.
When I talk to someone and promote our work and request a donation and if it does not come through, I tell myself that I need to do a better job. I take the responsibility on myself and work harder.
I have come to believe that nothing is impossible in life and we can do anything and everything. When a group of like minded motivated people come together to do good, nothing can stop them. We are always trying new things to take this movement further and there is nothing called “failure”. Everything is learning and we constantly improve ourselves and in this process we are moving towards “Vision 20/20 by 2020” every day. It is a lot of fun traveling the uncharted territory.
I feel as if the existence is moving through us and these wonderful things are happening. I want to enjoy the current moment and do the best of my ability.
We have a very committed group of volunteers in the USA, very motivated staff at our Hospitals in India and a great group of donors. When I visit our Hospitals, I always talk to the staff to find out how they are enjoying this work and I am very happy to let you know that the staff members know that they are a part of a movement to eradicate curable blindness and are very motivated and dedicated. I asked a driver who picked me up from the Airport to go to the Hospital – “How do you like working for Sankara?” and he replied “Murali Sir, what Sir! If there is another life, I would like to be a chappal (footwear) and serve this hospital, I am so fortunate Sir.” At another time, there was shortage of drivers that day and a driver who drives a bus to go to eye camps to pick up the patients came to pick me up after a full Bus Shift and I asked him the same question and he replied – “Murali Sir, I am extremely happy to be working here and don’t mind putting the extra hours and this good deed is going to benefit my children in their lives.”
When we go meet the patients the staff tell them that we are raising money in the USA for their cure. Even older patients try to touch our feet and we quickly move away and tell them it is our privilege and good fortune that we got this golden opportunity and we are thankful to you.
It is really an “eye opening” experience and I wake up every day thankful for this great opportunity and also thinking about how to share this positive experience with others and motivate them to be a part of this exciting journey.
How are we doing and what next? We have raised around $3.7M out of the required $4.2M for the construction of the Ludhiana, Punjab Hospital and we only have $500K to go by this December and I am sure we will get there with you. The inauguration is set for March 2012. We are hoping that we will get the land in Kanpur in a month or two for our tenth hospital. We are also expanding our Guntur (Andhra Pradesh) and the Anand (Gujarat) hospitals to serve more people well.
We need to build twelve more hospitals this decade and need to scale rapidly. Excellent systems and processes are setup at all our Hospitals and every Hospital is striving hard to become operationally Self-Sufficient. We are also organizing ourselves better in the USA and are trying to develop Southern California, New York, New Jersey, Seattle and other areas and are also learning the Foundations Grant process.
We surely are looking for more volunteers in California, New York, New Jersey and Seattle and we do need your continued financial support to get there.
Please consider supporting the popular ‘Open an eye a month’ sponsorship for only $30 a month at Coimbatore, Bangalore, Anand, Guntur and Shimoga. Please become a Founding donor for $1,000 and have the name of a beloved one on the Hospital “Wall of Founders” at any of Ludhiana (Punjab), Kanpur (UP), Guntur (AP), Anand (Gujarat) or Shimoga (Karnataka). It will be wonderful if donors can commit to supporting this movement for the next ten years, say $1,000 a year, or $360 a year, etc.,
If an institution or a donor can donate $1M or more, we will outright buy a land in Kanpur for our next Hospital, if needed, and expedite the Focus-UP project. Each of our new Hospital construction only costs anywhere from $4M to $5M and the cost of twelve new Sankara eye hospitals is only $60M or so. If we can get such an amount, why wait until 2020, we can reach there by 2020 and do even more like taking this to other poor countries.
Thanks,
Murali Krishnamurthy
