The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Risa Gold MD, President of Miracle of Help Charity

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

Risa Gold MD, President of Miracle of Help Charity miracleofhelp.org Risa Gold MD, DLFAPA is a board-certified Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist in Cold Spring Harbor, NY. She graduated Cum Laude from Harvard, and earned her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Gold completed a residency in Psychiatry at Payne Whitney Clinic, New York Hospital, Cornell and a Fellowship in Child Adolescence Psychiatry at North Shore University Hospital. After serving as the President of the Greater Long Island Psychiatric Society, Dr. Gold was awarded Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Gold has been in private practice since 1987. After her son returned from a medical service outreach trip in Sierra Leone, he alerted her to the pressing need for health care services in these remote and vulnerable villages. Dr. Gold started MOH USA, Inc to raise funds for a community-led project that would comprise a hospital complex and several small businesses to support it. She is married to Dr. Kenneth Gold & has raised four children.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. For 15 years, we've been bringing you the Chris Voss Show.

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that's coming to you in bottles very soon. You'll be able to order it on the Chris Voss show. The Chris Voss Glow. Hey, those girls can sell all sorts of stuff on OnlyFans. I'm selling the Chris Voss glow in a bottle. And it's going to be like the Emperor's Clothes. It'll just be, I don't know, we'll put like Firefly in there,

one of those lightning bees in West Virginia or something really cool. And then you'll be like, holy crap, it's the Chris Voss show glow. I'll just put a hair of my beard in there. We have an amazing guest on the show, and I'm excited to talk to her about her experience and what she does. And she does some great things and she's done some great things. She does some great things.

She's just looking to do more. And so we'll be talking to how you can help. As we talk to her, you can check out her website. It's called miracle of help.org. Rise of gold or Risa gold. Is there Risa. Risa Gold. There you go. Risa Gold is a board certified child and adolescent psychiatrist in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. She graduated cum laude from Harvard and earned her medical degree from Columbia University College

of Physicians and Surgeons. She completed a residency in psychiatry at the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York Hospital, Cornell, and fellowship in child adolescent psychiatry at North Shore University Hospital. She served as president of the Greater Long Island Psychiatry Society, and she was awarded Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. After the show, she's going to try and figure out whether I really do need a frontal lobotomy or not. I'm going to get a third or fourth opinion from her, but everyone else so far is voting yes. Welcome to the show. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you so much for that beautiful introduction.

There you go. Well, we have some fun. We just kind of make each one up as we go along, and sometimes they're funny, and sometimes they're just stupid. Sometimes stupid is kind of funny. I mean, if you've ever seen Politicians. So give us the.com one more time so people can know how to look you up on the interwebs. Okay, it's

miracleofhelp.org, and so it's health, H-E-L-P, not health and not hope. Although we do wish to bring hope and we wish to bring health, it's miracleofhealth, H-E-L-P,.org. There you go. So give us an overview of what you guys do there. bring free medical care to a very underserved rural area in eastern sierra leone that has no access to doctors or nurses and particularly there was no place to have a baby so my son had gone over uh and done a medical outreach there and when he came home, it changed his life. He was a different person.

And what he had seen in terms of the poverty and the lack of health care astonished him, moved him, and changed him. Wow. And when he told me the story, it astonished me. It moved me. And it changed me also. He said, Mom, you have no idea. You live in a bubble. You have no idea. So we set out to, there's a lot of doctors in our family. And I said, you know what?

Let's try to help them if we can. And we set out to build a very small maternity hospital to address the issue of no place to have a baby. Well, don't they have taxis there? No, I'm just kidding. Well, there's no paved roads. Oh, wow. There's no internet. There's no electricity.

There's no running water. Many, many people in the country do not have access to clean drinking water. Wow. So in order to start this hospital and to set it up, we did what's called a vision meeting. And we sat down with the villagers of this community that we're hoping to serve. We asked them to tell us what it is they wanted and what it is they needed. And as a psychiatrist, I don't know a lot about public health,

and I don't know a lot about, you know, big organizations and how they function. But as a psychiatrist, I do know how to listen. And I said, let's talk to the community and find out what it is they want and what it is they need. So we did a four-day vision meeting. Many of the villagers are illiterate. Wow. So they could not write down on paper what they wanted, but they drew pictures. Oh.

And some of the villagers who were literate were able to label the pictures for us and then present at the end of this four days a model that they had developed themselves after much discussion much voting much back and forth and we call it holistic holistic community-led development ah so what that is is they said don't just give us a hospital we won't have means to support it yeah help us support our start small businesses and help support them help our farmers there you go a decent price for their crops so that they can feed their children and they can afford health care. There you go. Help our indigent women. A lot of the women who give birth are poor and they can't afford to feed their children.

Wow. They said, help us with skills training so that we can give these women a job. So we said, okay, what would be the training? They said, our women would like to learn how to sew, how to weave, how to dye clothes, how to do vegetable gardening, to which I have added literacy and computer skills.

There you go. So that's, you know, of the present, of the present moment. So it sounds like they're more interested in, you know, that old adage, teach a man and woman how to fish. And, you know, if you give someone a fish and, you know, that sort of thing. If you give them a fish, they eat for a day. If you teach them to fish, they eat every day. There you go.

My uncle used to do a thing where he would go to Africa on a mission outreach. I don't remember. I wasn't too familiar with what he was doing. But I remember one of the challenges they would have is they would take chickens to them. They would have to teach them how to farm the then and then get the chickens to breed yes and about seven times he had to go back because they would eventually eat the chickens and then they would be dead in the water right and he's like you know you have to go back and teach him hey you don't you don't you don't eat your you know you don't you don't you don't you don't smoke your own supply, basically. Right, right.

Scarface. Exactly. So what we discovered among the people is that there is a huge level of malnutrition among the children. Wow. Established a small maternity clinic. And once a month, we do a pop-up clinic, which is two doctors, two lab techs, and a midwife. We treat all comers, men, women, and children, not just pregnant women. Our clinic during the week takes care of pregnant women and postpartum women and children under the age of five.

There you go. Once a month, we bring in the doctors. So what we discovered from our doctors is that 80% of the children have some degree of malnutrition. 80%. Like they said, yeah, we see a healthy one once in a while, but most of them are malnourished. I shouldn't laugh, but it's sad to think, you know. I believe Sierra Leone is one of those countries that's been ravaged by civil wars and wars for the longest time, isn't it? Civil war and then the Ebola outbreak.

Oh, yeah, Ebola. So we've started two malnutrition clinics to take care of these children. And the goal is to give their moms jobs because these are the women who can't afford to feed their children. And we've already started the first 25 women have jobs now. And we have another 25 women that we're getting ready for their kids to graduate. And we're going to be ready to give them jobs too. That's awesome. And so you give these people tools

that they can use to survive and skills. And if you have skills, it looks like you have a clean water project. Yes. That's going on. A generous donor, the New Hope Foundation, donated,

they're very interested in clean water and we were not aware of the scope of the problem until we looked into it. But patients and children in particular were coming to our clinics with recurrent gastrointestinal diseases that we would give antibiotics, but the diseases wouldn't clear up. And we sent word to find out in these villages, did they have access to clean water to drink? And the answer was no, they did not have access to clean water to drink and the answer was no they did not have access to clean water and so this generous donor gave us money and we dug wells

for seven villages that had never had access to clean water before so now there's seven communities that have clean drinking water and that's really important because there's all sorts of path I don't know if pathogens or your important because there's all sorts of path, I don't know if pathogens or you're a doctor, but there's all sorts of pathogens and worms and all sorts of weird stuff you can get. This is why they tell you, you know, be careful what you drink when you travel from America. And blood, I think bloodborne viruses.

I think some of our soldiers pick some of that up with bad water conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, yeah, clean water is really important. So you're providing the basics that people need picked some of that up with bad water conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, yeah, clean water is really important. So you're providing the basics that people need to survive, get tools they need to do stuff. And so would we be calling Miracle of Help a charity organization?

We're a charity. We're a nonprofit. We're a 501c3. And our latest outreach is to the farmers in the community. Because the area that we're working in is rural, and the major farming crops are cocoa beans, rice, palm oil, coffee to a lesser extent. And as a sort of tail end of colonialism, the actual Sierra Leone people do not engage in commerce. It's done by foreigners. So they don't take their own crops to market. Outsiders do.

Oh, wow. But if you can't take your crops to market. Outsiders do. Oh, wow. But if you can't take your crops to market, you can't get fair market price. Yeah, you're creating a middleman who's going to take a cut of the action. Exactly. And so we have formed our first cooperative with 500 cocoa farmers with the goal of helping them take their crops to market directly so that they can reap a fair market price. There you go. And maximize their return. Exactly.

And then feed their children. There you go. And, and, and, and, and, and,

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and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and create life and everything else when it really springs from. So what are you guys looking for? Are you looking for donations from anyone and everyone? I notice there's a donate thing on your guys' page. Are you looking for major donors to come in or other charities to come in and work with you? I have a quote that I wanted to share with you because you said,

bring some material. Okay, so the quote is from Howard Thurman, who was a civil rights activist who taught Martin Luther King. And he said, don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive. And go do that. There go find your purpose what the world needs is people who have come alive and what i discovered from this work is you get a surge of happiness when you help others with no expectation of return there you go. It's a wonderful state of gratitude, I think, where it's giving back and being grateful for what you have and sharing it.

That's right. And as a physician, I take care of patients, which is very gratifying, but they're paying me. So they're expecting a service. Yeah. But when you help somebody who has no way of repaying you, it is a surge of happiness like I've never experienced before. Wow. And my son experienced when he was there. Mm-hmm. And I would like everybody to have that feeling.

It's amazing. Yeah. If you could send a dollar, we're going to be helping somebody who couldn't help themselves. There you go. If you could send a dollar, we're going to be helping somebody who couldn't help themselves. There you go. Or if you can send more and get involved maybe long-term with your program too. Absolutely right. We would love small donors, medium-sized donors, big donors, anybody with expertise, anybody with know-how, technology, areas that they know would be helpful here.

We're a very grassroots organization. So we're, it's friends and family right now. And we are pulling in, I'm pulling in my college, my medical school, my graduate program. I'm just trying to pull in the people who I think would understand what we're doing and be supportive.

There you go. You know, and these are people that are, are at the baseline of life, you know, no clean water, no electricity, you know,

they don't have the internet. You know, I mean, here in America, you turn off people's internet for five minutes and they think they're in the third world country. But they still have everything else for the basics. They'll live.

But these folks are, you know, they might be dying of health issues or, you know, even just simple things, you know, the kind of maybe we saw in the 1800s. If you don't have penicillin for, you know, cuts and infections and different things, you know, just really simple stuff where, you know, most of us here in America go down to get that. I noticed on your website, there's a vision, I think, or a proposed plan of a small hospital or health center. Absolutely. A maternal child health center. What we're running now is a maternal child health post, which is a clinic that's open seven days a week, treats people for free.

But it only treats pregnant women, postpartum women, children under five. There's no place. It's a small clinic. We call it the Little Blue Clinic, and there's pictures of it on the website. There's no place for anybody to stay overnight there and part of the issue for pregnancy in in sierra leone is that there is no form of transportation other than walking wow so if a pregnant woman wants to deliver she walks to the nearest hospital. Wow. And the nearest hospital is 34 kilometers. So women walk to the hospital while they're in labor.

They die on the way. Jesus. And the baby dies. Wow. So this is the number one. It's the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world in Sierra Leone. And among the highest for infant mortality and this is part of the problem is there's no transportation to the hospital no way to get there there you go our district has one ambulance for 500,000 people holy crap there's that many people

living there oh you could call the ambulance but it will come a month later oh wow so we want to build a small hospital right in our community where women can access it within you know a 10 minute walk a 15 minute walk a 20 minute walk rather than a three day walk to their death there you go and uh it's small it's 10 to 15 beds but it will have an operating room so that if a woman needs a cesarean section she could get it and it will have overnight capacity so that women could come before they give birth and get prenatal care and get prenatal care. And in the old days, they called these hospitals lying in hospitals because women about, about term would come to the hospital,

check in and just wait to give birth. Wow. It's, it's, it's, there's such a baseline of, of life that any help can be given to them can make all the difference in the world uh tell us about your history what uh what road did you go

down that on this hero's journey that made it so that you you wanted to uh do this and work with these folks well in in terms of my own personal history um um, about almost 20 years ago, I got very, very sick. I had, um, uh, very advanced cancer.

Oh, wow. And it was a 50, 50 shot, whether I was going to make it. And I had sort of a miraculous recovery. And along those lines, And I had sort of a miraculous recovery. Mm-hmm. And along those lines, it occurred to me that I wanted to give something back for this miracle of my life that had been restored to me.

Mm-hmm. But I didn't know exactly how I would do that um and then when my son and also my daughter went over to africa to do these medical outreach programs it it began to occur to me that this was an area that really, really needed my help. There you go. And as you said, lacking the basics, lacking my son, when he came home, he said, Mom, you take a shower in drinking water every day. I never thought of it that way. Neither did I. Yeah. And I was like, you that way. Neither did I. Yeah.

And I was like, you know what? You're right. Because if you turn on the tap, it's clean water. Yeah. He said, where I was in Sierra Leone, they don't have clean drinking water. Wow. They drink from muddy pools and dirty streams and the river. Wow.

And the river is where people wash their clothes, where animal wastes are drained. People go to the bathroom in the river. Yeah. And the villages upstream use the river for the same thing. Wow. So they need all the help they can get you guys have a solar system set up for them so that it can keep the everything going with the with the water and stuff well

solar is our next goal okay it's a solar company in canada that has um very graciously agreed to make us a solar plan as a donation. So when we have that plan, we will hope to get a donation or many donations to set up solar for them. Our clinic has some solar panels already. We've built a guest house for visiting doctors and nurses to stay and um eventually when the hospital is built um that guest house will become doctor's quarters so that will be a permanent home for the doctor who is on staff or the doctors who are on staff. And that guest house needs solar. We don't have it yet. And there's also a Starlink connection. I think it's from Tesla.

Oh, Starlink. Yeah. Yeah. I use that in Ukraine and stuff. Right. Where you can actually, it's like a suitcase. But if you have the link, the doctors can use this suitcase apparatus and connect to the internet oh wow so that's also on our wish list is starlink

if any of your listeners elon hello elon all right are you here elon is listening that would be cool yeah and then companies I would imagine that want to are looking to donate stuff and help their write off base and you know supporting good causes they can reach out to you as well and get involved

and so this is really good because people you know it's amazing to me, a lot of, uh, Africa was decimated by AIDS, uh, Ebola. I mean, civil wars and wars and some of our mucking about with trying to, to bring democracy to different places or trying to pick leaders. We did a lot of that in South America. Um, and, uh, and, you know, it's just, it's just been a constant struggle for them. or trying to pick leaders. We did a lot of that in South America. And it's just been a constant struggle for them. I think with AIDS, it was going to wipe out a quarter of the population, I think.

Yes. Which was really setting them back a long ways because you had children growing up without parents. You had children with AIDS it was just insane of course they can't get the medication or access to medication that we have over here that's kept a lot of people with AIDS now alive for decades and so they just they just got decimated and they were at one point before AIDS they were a rising potential for dominant power but you know if you wipe out a quarter of your generations, you know, that you're just, you're stuck in a spiral. And then all the other thing that goes on in that country with civil wars and wars and power grabs, we're seeing some of that today.

So what's your big vision for this? What's your hope that this becomes in the end? Well, I just want to address the aids thing because there is some good news on that front oh yeah um there's a piece of legislation called pepfar which i think was started by president bush which is the president's it's like an executive outreach to africa for aids i don't remember what the PEPFAR stands for, but it's funding for AIDS treatment, which is actually available through the Sierra Leone government at many levels of healthcare, even though the healthcare is very fragile in the country because of ebola um hiv treatment is available and our clinic is too small to um be given those

medicines by the government but the next level up which is called a community health center they have access to those medications oh wow so we have now six hiv positive women in our community oh really and three pregnant women who are hiv positive oh no and our project our work now is to help get these women to treatment at the chc but there is medicine available and africa is beginning to turn the tide on um on on the aids crisis um and there's an organization called africa mission health care that um uh is working in many countries to um bring aids education and aids treatment to prevent what's called the vertical transmission of HIV. Vertical meaning a pregnant mother gives it to her baby. Yeah.

So there is definitely good news in this area, which is wonderful for us because we've identified these patients and now we're going to try to steer them to um to treatment there you go you know with the help of education with the help of outreach uh trying to arrange transportation for them um but our government has already stepped in in a big way uh to address this problem which is you know just wonderful and very forward thinking and and our big vision is to, if our model works the way we think it will work and is working, this model could be reproduced in other communities.

In other words, a small maternity hospital or a small general hospital surrounded by businesses that support it, skills training centers to help the indigent women. In Sierra Leone, women are often landowners, have no support unless they're married. So skills training for the indigent women, help to the farmer so that they can become self-sufficient and independent. And if this model proves itself out, it could be reproduced in other communities around Sierra Leone and throughout Africa.

There you go. And we have had two pieces of recognition already. There was a book written called Provocateurs, Not Philanthropists by Maiden Manzanel Frank that looks at people like me who are not doing what other people are doing and coming up with something new and who have created a new model for outreach and for self-sufficiency and self-determination. So we were featured in this book, which was very thrilling. And we got an award, Impact Company of the Year for 2023 from Dotcom Magazine. So we know we've made an impact already.

You know, 400 patients plus come to our clinic every month for our two-day or three three day pop-up clinic. We have 500 farmers in our co-op and we're running a surgery program and we do two free surgeries every month. So there's probably 40 or 50 patients who've had free surgery as a result of coming to our clinic. So we know we've had an impact already. We would like to have a bigger impact and we would like our model to be reproduced in other communities and potentially other countries. That would be awesome. Especially if you could replicate the success through other communities in

Africa and, you know, I mean, anything we can help to get them back online, you know, you know, the issues they have with the Russian government's trying to farm them, the Chinese are trying to farm them for resources and stuff. Right. And they're kind of caught in the middle. Yes. And anything that can empower them to build their own way and become their own country. And they have the potential to be a rising power.

They're a resource-rich continent. Yes, yes. And so many different things that they can be doing. And like I said, it wasn't for AIDS or something like that. So as we go out, Risa, give us your final pitch and all that good stuff. Well, if people want to have a surge of happiness and feel that they've done something incredible, which is what this work is all about. We call it spreading the love. There you go. We it spreading the love there you go um uh we're spreading the love

and if people want to spread the love with us we would love that we post pictures on the website of every project everything we're doing we just immediately put pictures up um donors i send them pictures of what we're working on this is very um homespun and grassroots but it's about spreading the love so i'm spreading the love to you and i'm spreading it to your readers and your listeners and your viewers and i invite invite all to come and join us on this incredible, exciting, and wonderful work. And I do consider myself the luckiest doctor alive that gets to do this. There you go. You get to pay it back.

I love it. Now, give us the.org one more time. So it's miracleofhelp, M-I-R-A-C-L-E, of, O-FF help, H-E-L-P dot org. There you go. New York health help dot org. There you go. Giving to others of yourself, especially when you don't ask for something in return, is one of the greatest gifts you can do. Especially, it's just good karma.

It makes you feel good. It's good for you. There's so many examples through my life where i've given to people selflessly and the rewards that have paid off um you you can't enumerate and that's not what it's about but but uh just being grateful and giving back and helping other people lift other people just just bring such a joy to one's life and i'm glad you guys are doing that. To my audience, thank you for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Foss,

LinkedIn.com, Fortuness Chris Foss, YouTube.com, Fortuness Chris Foss, and Chris Foss1 at TikTok. We really appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.