A Finnish friend of mine (NK) was in Mauritius, a few months ago, with her family, visiting her husband's relatives. During the trip, one of her two daughters had to spend some time in a hospital. While there, NK made friends with MaR, whose little boy, Muzakir was a patient in the same ward.
This entry is about Muzakir - a child with the most beautiful chocolate eyes.
Muzakir is five months old, and suffers from kidney problems. He has already had one expensive operation, but now needs another operation, which has been booked to take place on 18th December 2012 at Apollo Bramwell Hospital in Mauritius. The family needs to collect money for it as all their savings went to the first operation.
They need MUR 576,000 = €14,325 = US$18,315 = GB£11,593
(Currency rate for Mauritian Rupee may change - click on the links for the most recent rate..)
This is where helping gets difficult.
Normally, you could set up a ChipIn account, which would pay donations to the recipient's PayPal account, and the owner of the account could then transfer them to their bank account.
However, our little patient and his family live in Mauritius. I am not entirely sure if PayPal Mauritius (which I've only just now discovered!) has all the same functions available than PayPal Ireland, for example (which is where my personal PayPal account is - and I've never even used it yet). As I was googling about it, the other day, I didn't get PayPal Mauritius in the results, but I got a discussion (2010-2011), which mentioned another site as a way of getting PayPal funds paid to Mauritius; 2Checkout.com
As it turns out that PayPal might nowadays work normally in Mauritius as well, maybe there's no need to use 2Checkout, although fair play to them for replying promptly to my Twitter query.
MaR (Muzakir's mother) has stayed in touch with NK (my friend in Finland), but MaR doesn't have internet connection at home, and having six children, with the youngest of them (Muzakir) being ill, it's understandable that she can't be going out all the time, to check her email. As far as I've understood, she's not extremely familiar with opening various online accounts, but we are trying to find a way for her to get that PayPal account up and running, so that we could actually start asking for donations towards little Muzakir's operation. I have sent her instructions by email, and a text message to let her know that it's something she should get done a.s.a.p.
After all, we need to collect a lot of money in a very short time!
If anyone who reads this, would like to make a donation, I will post a donation link as soon as we have one available! First, we need to make sure that they will be able to access any funds that may be donated, but hopefully PayPal Mauritius will be useful for that.
(Photos used with permission.)
No comments:
Post a Comment