There is a wonderful crisis care clinic in Lovina on the northside of the island of Bali that is doing incredible things for the local people, saving lives, helping during emergency situations, such as the Bali bombings, delivering babies, helping anyone in need.
The lady that runs the clinic is from Australia everyone calls her Mama Gloria, she is one of the most caring unselfish dedicated people I have ever met. If anyone has a few minutes to stop in, take a look at her clinic or even take a look at her website which is balicrisiscare.org you can get an idea how important she is to the people of Bali.
Obviously they are supported only by donations...the majority of their donations are from Australia and Hawaii...They need absoultely everything. The facility is great, but they are located in the hill so during the dry season water is a HUGE problem..and very very expensive for them. Also electric goes out quite often, and they have no back up generator. Her Van has no lift for a stretcher, they must lift an injured person into the van...on and on.
They also need to have a midwife to help with delivery of babies. There is a great dedicated balinese gal that works for Gloria and lives in the area who is a nurse. She really needs to go to school to get her certificate to be able to be a midwife. It doesn't cost much, I forgot exactly how much, for some reason I believe it is about $50 a month..I could be off a little...but anyway to make a very long post not much longer, please take a look at her website, check out the clinic and what she does for the people and how important her work is, and how limited her funding is...she isn't a young woman, and has used all her saving etc. to keep this place running, she has been doing this in Lovina for over 10 years.
If anyone is looking for a charity to make donations to, or has a little cash they can spare, or even things, towels, blankets, escential oils, there is also a recover/meditation room and apparently these escential oils are hard to come by in Bali..vitamins, especially prenatal, baby asprin, fortunatley they are able to get some of these things from Australia donations, but the need goes on and on. She works strictly by donation. If you get medicine, if you have no money, you put nothing in the box, if you do, you put what you can. That doesn't change even for the tourist, however the clinic isn't for tourists, but she helped me with a problem and charged me nothing. Of course I made as generous a donations as I could...
I have also taken a couple of my friends to meet her, both of them are bule...(expats) one has lived in Bali over 20 yrs and the other about 3 yrs. they were both very impressed and are putting together donations, my one friend gave a very generous cash donation her second visit, and told me she was going to set it up to make that donation monthly. I didn't try to sell them on the idea of helping them, I just told them about her and let them come to their own conclusion, I just wanted them to meet Gloria, she is a fun person that doesn't have much of a life outside of the clinic and her darling little Indonesian daughter Claudia she adopted the moment she was born, and is now 9 yrs. old...the mother was an unmarried teen and couldn't/wouldn't keep her...I tried to take her to lunch, which I did once, but she was never free to go with the three of us while we were there...no, we weren't bad company..we had fun....she just lives for the clinic and Claudia..
Happy Holidays everyone...hope I wasn't too long winded..