Letters
On behalf of St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake I would like to recognize Dr. Paula Dhanda for her service to our community and to women and children in need all over the world.
On Feb. 23, she was celebrated as an Unsung Hero of Compassion in a ceremony of gratitude honoring 52 extraordinary volunteers from around the world.
Dr. Dhanda received a personal thank you and blessing from His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, for her work in creating and leading Worldwide Healing Hands.
Through this organization she and her team of volunteers focused on averting preventable tragedies during pregnancy and childbirth for women and to raising awareness of the great need for medical care.
It has been a great honor working with Dr. Dhanda. Her passion and commitment are boundless, as is her creativity in finding ways to reach out and bring care to communities in need.
Her dedication started early in life, accompanying her father, a surgeon, as he served the indigent in Bombay, India, and surrounding rural communities.
His example inspired her to become a doctor, in turn, specializing in obstetrics and gynecological care, and eventually to leave her successful Beverly Hills medical practice in search of greater opportunities to serve.
Seeing a shortage of physicians providing women’s care and limited health services for the indigent population, she moved to Lake County in 1990 to join St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake.
Since 2005, she has held medical directorship positions including medical director of surgery/obstetrics and chief of staff at St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake.
Wherever she has served, whether here at home in Lake County or in Chad, Haiti or Nepal, Dr. Dhanda has brought hope and quality medical care to women and their newborns.
Dr. Dhanda and her team provide education and support to mothers and local medical staff, perform corrective surgeries for childbirth injuries, teach life-saving preventive care techniques, manage high-risk births and provide a full range of women's health care for every kind of situation, from high-tech delivery suites to earthquake-ravaged hospitals to isolated field clinics.
The positive impact on individual women and children, families, and communities is incalculable.
I, for one, am grateful that this everyday hero has chosen to call our community home.
David Santos is vice president of St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake in Clearlake, Calif.
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- Written by: David Santos
The Sierra Club is proud to endorse Lake County Measure L, a ballot initiative to fund a variety of projects benefiting Clear Lake and other local waterways that will go before the voters at the June 3 primary election.
Placed on the ballot by unanimous vote of the Lake County Board of Supervisors, this proposal will impose an additional half-cent sales tax on transactions throughout the county, and use the money to strengthen efforts to prevent quagga and zebra mussels from infesting Lake County waterways; provide the county's share of the critical Middle Creek wetland restoration project funding; conduct a number of specific projects designed to improve water quality; and maintain existing programs to control noxious algae and nuisance aquatic weeds.
These programs are essential to preserving and restoring Clear Lake, our community’s greatest asset.
Measure L revenues cannot be diverted to any other purposes, and transparency is assured by the establishment of a citizens oversight committee that will review the expenditure plan in advance every year. The measure sunsets in ten years.
In most respects Measure L resembles Measure E, which was also endorsed by the Club and which narrowly failed to reach the necessary two thirds majority vote in November 2012, but it differs in three significant ways:
- a detailed expenditure plan for the first two years is included in the ballot measure;
- projects must be reviewed in advance by a citizens’ oversight committee and Board of Supervisors;
- the oversight committee now includes stakeholders from a wide variety of community organizations.
Without a reliable source of funding we cannot protect Clear Lake from invasive species and reverse the conditions that have allowed toxic, foul-smelling cyanobacteria (commonly called “blue-green algae”) to proliferate.
Restoring the health of the lake is imperative for its own sake, and also vital for the future of our community, and the future of our children and grandchildren.
The Lake County Sierra Club therefore urges our members and everyone else who cares about the environment to vote for Measure L on June 3, and in the meantime to learn more about the measure, give your personal and business endorsement, and make a donation by visiting www.savethelake.info .
Ed Robey is chair of the Sierra Club Lake Group. He lives in Lower Lake, Calif.
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- Written by: Ed Robey
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