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UVa Nursing Students Raise Money for Clinic in El Salvador

It’s a charity project that’s been more than a decade in the making, and now it’s finally coming to life.

WMRA’S Sefe Emokpae has the story about an effort benefitting people in El Salvador all the way from Charlottesville.

The UVa Nursing Students Without Borders organization and the Charlottesville-based Building Goodness Foundation are celebrating the groundbreaking of a project in San Sebastian, El Salvador that was started 15 years ago. Nursing students have raised close to $100,000 and were able to purchase land for a brand new building desperately needed by the area’s Red Cross clinic. Beth Loudin is the president of UVa Nursing Students Without Borders. She says it’s been a group effort that started long before she even got to grounds.

LOUDIN:  It would be just silly to take any credit for this because it has been just so many years of hard work and passion put into this.  And being in this position, I’ve had a new sight on just how much has gone into this and it’s a lot of hard work so I’m so glad to be able to do this today.

Building Goodness Foundation volunteers construction services to help organizations both in the local community and internationally. Ethan Tate is the Projects Coordinator. He says projects exactly like this are why the organization even exists. Something that typically takes them 4-12 months to complete has the potential to change a community for a lifetime.

TATE:  Our mission is to build community and improve lives and there’s a lot of organizations out there doing that in different ways and so we want to be really efficient in how we deliver our volunteers services to the world.

The Red Cross clinic provides the only emergency medical care from 4pm to 8am within 30 miles of San Sebastian.

Sefe Emokpae was a freelance journalist for WMRA from 2014 - 2017.