Global National’s Everyday Hero

This week’s “Everyday Hero” is an Ontario doctor who challenged her colleagues to ‘Give a Day’s’ pay to help those with AIDS.

TORONTO – A few years ago, Jane Philpott was asked to give a talk to collegues at her hospital about how HIV and AIDS is devastating Africa.

The Ontario family doctor went further than that – she asked each of the doctors who attended to donate one day’s pay to an AIDS charity.

“It really was an epiphany kind of moment,” says Philpott, 46. “There was a little joking in the group. We all know each other quite well…’Who’s going to be on plastics clinic or fractures clinic, that day? Who’s going to make the most money on World AIDS day?’. So there was a little collegial joking around.”

That year, Philpott was able to raise $33,000 for AIDS charities. The next year, the Give A Day campaign expanded to eight hospitals in southern Ontario, raising $100,000.

Philpott’s commitment to fighting AIDS in Africa has its roots in her own experience there. She spent nearly a decade working with Doctors Without Borders in Niger – a desperately poor country in West African, with one of the highest child mortality rates in the world.

Sadly, it was while striving to save the lives of people in Niger that Philpott lost her own child to meningitis, at the age of just 2.

“So that really gave me a sense of what an African mother goes through,” said Philpott. “Even though it was obviously very difficult for me at the time, what came out of that was an understanding that African mothers lose their babies by the thousands every day. And so, as hard as it was for me, why should an African mother expect that 25 per cent of her children won’t live to the age of five?”

One of the gravest challenges facing Africa is the AIDS pandemic; the disease is the biggest single killer of Africans. The United Nations estimates 24-million people carry the AIDS virus in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

So, when Philpott returned with her family to Stouffville, Ontario to set up practice there, the grim realities of life and death in Africa stayed with her and became the movitating spark to continue doing something to save lives.

Now that spark – Give A Day – has become a flame.

“It literally has taken a life of its own,” she says. “Now there are business people, and lawyers, and teachers, and schoolkids who have paper routes who are giving a day’s pay. So, it really has shown that sense of global solidarity (from) Canadians across all walks of life.”

And, it isn’t just in Ontario any more.

All across Canada, people are inspired by Dr. Philpott’s example to ‘Give a Day’; last year, about a half-million dollars was raised.

Despite the grim statistics, Philpott underlines that AIDS is a treatable disease and that a little money can go a long way.

“A hundred dollars, for instance, can provide anti-retroviral medication that can keep a person alive for 9 months.”

Give A Day channels the money it raises to two Canadian-based charities: Dignitas International and the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

This year, Philpott is hoping that three-quarters of a million dollars will go their way.

It is a challenging life being a doctor in a busy family practice as well as the mother of now 4 children. Give A Day takes many, many more days than just one for Dr. Philpott – but she brushes aside any suggestion that she’s doing something extraordinary.

“There’s a brilliant AIDS activist by the name of Zaki Ahmed, and he said ‘nobody wants to be a hero on a platform of skulls or skeletons.’ Honestly, I’m doing such a little wee bit. The heroes are the people that face this every day: the grandmothers, the children who rise to be the leaders of sibling-headed households. I’m really just doing my bit.”

So for getting Canadians everywhere to do their bit, one day a year, Jane Philpott is this week’s Everyday Hero.