Receiving the Urology Care Foundation™ Humanitarian of the Year Award was exciting as well as a humbling moment. In my life, lessons from my spiritual teachers (gurus) have been: “Do not work for recognition or expectation of return, but do the work that inspires others to service. Don’t wave a flag of your deeds as it diminishes their value.” I am also cognizant that a number of people and associations have guided and helped me in my endeavors in the field of volunteerism. So I would like to dedicate this piece to all of them collectively.

Organizations such as the Urology Care Foundation™, IVU here in the US and Jeev Sewa Sansthan in India, the Tiba Foundation in Kenya, and Liga International in Mexico have been partners and enablers in this journey. The dedicated staff and volunteers in these organizations are phenomenal with their silent help.

I have been in volunteerism from a young age, encouraged by my mother who I credit for inspiring me in my path of philanthropy. I started in the Mother Teresa ashram volunteering in her home for the dying in Kolkata. She was an inspiration to me as well as to the rest of the world. My wife Maya has been a rock in my life and supported my endeavors with her silent prayers while I was volunteering in war zones. Medical missions have taken me throughout the world. India, my birth place, is most common, but I have served in Gaza during active conflict, in Afghanistan pleading with Taliban leaders to let me build schools for girls, and in Haiti where the needs are enormous for health and education (Figure 1). I still go to Mexico for a weekend on a monthly basis to serve in a rural clinic in San Blas (Figure 2).

Figure 1. In Haiti with Mother Teresa’s Charity Sisters.

Figure 2. Repairing a pediatric hernia in San Blas, Mexico.

Figure 3. One of our schools in Bansberia, India.

Education of children, especially girls, is a passion for me, and I have helped 38 schools in 6 countries (Figure 3). I am supporting 14 girls in an orphanage in India, and seeing them learn and blossom toward self-reliance is gratifying. I am honored to partner with the Milaan Foundation in developing and nurturing the Girl Icons program, teaching leadership to thousands of adolescent rural girls in India.

I feel we are fortunate to be in a specialty where we can help so many while doing what we like most: urology. Decades of giving back through urologic missions in many countries like India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Haiti, Kenya, Egypt, Niger, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mexico, etc, have brought me immense joy. The gratitude of the ones we help is a blessing, which goes a long way in life. Yet we must not be complacent as the need to develop urologic infrastructure, local training, and service are still immense.

Let me share an experience with you. In 1989, I encountered an 18-year-old young woman in San Blas with exstrophy of the bladder. All her life she was totally incontinent of urine, ostracized by her community and deprived of school education and social interaction. I sought help from my plastic surgeon colleague there and took her to the local hospital in Los Mochis. At surgery, I dissected and preserved the exposed bladder base and then opened her cecum to place on the bladder base, thereby making a spherical neobladder. I then brought the appendix as a stoma to catheterize. My plastic surgeon friend helped me close the gap in the lower abdomen over a thick mesh graft. A month later I flew down to teach her self-catheterization. After more than 3 decades now, she works as a beautician in Culiacán and comes to meet me during my mission trips to San Blas.

We may not do great things in life, but we can always do our little things with great love.

Mother Teresa