Consider making holiday gifts that can save lives

Every fall I offer an alternative holiday gift guide with suggestions for “gifts with meaning” that save or change lives. This year’s recommendations come with something extra: A reader has pledged $1 million so that for each of the next 10 years, a charity I find most worthy will receive $100,000. In addition, $50,000 will be split among three runners-up, thanks to a few other large donations. And judging from the past, readers will send in many more donations to these groups. We’ve made that easier through a new website.

This year’s top prize goes to support the lifesaving hospital of Edna Adan, a Somali midwife who fights for women’s health, trains doctors and empowers women in her native Somaliland. I’m awed by what she does.

Edna scandalized Somaliland by learning to read at a time when girls were barred from even elementary school there. She later studied in Britain, became a nurse midwife, enjoyed a high-flying career with the World Health Organization — and then used her savings to build a maternity hospital that opened in Somaliland in 2002.

Then she started a university and medical school that is training a new generation of Somali doctors and medical workers, 70% of them female. Edna sent me a photo this year of an all-female surgical team: a woman surgeon, a woman nurse and a woman anesthetist. It’s breathtaking to see in a country that once barred girls from getting any education.

Edna draws no pay from her hospital; instead, she subsidizes it with her United Nations pension. Somaliland remains one of the world’s most difficult places to be born female and has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality.

So, readers, consider a gift to the Edna Adan University Hospital — and help save a woman’s life.

If your holiday giving preferences run elsewhere, the three runners-up will also make excellent use of your contributions.

Fight cervical cancer. This is a disease that kills more women worldwide than childbirth yet gets much less attention. Cervical cancer is sometimes diagnosed by the stench from rotting flesh. What’s more, cervical cancer is relatively cheap and easy to prevent with HPV vaccination (less than $5 a shot in developing countries) or a screen-and-treat protocol for precancerous lesions.

I suggest the Maya Health Alliance in Guatemala, which works with indigenous Maya villagers. As individuals, we can’t change America’s harsh policy toward Guatemalan migrants, but we can help save the lives of Guatemalan women from cervical cancer.

Fight worms and blindness. If cervical cancer in women is horrific and preventable, a counterpart that strikes men is a parasite-caused disease called elephantiasis. This disease survives because the people who suffer these horrors are impoverished. The End Fund is working to eradicate elephantiasis and other “neglected tropical diseases,” including river blindness and trachoma, both painful causes of blindness. They, too, have cheap and simple solutions.

Help children learn to read. Reach Out and Read supports disadvantaged preschoolers right here in the United States. It coaches parents on the importance of reading to their children every evening and gives away children’s books, often to homes without a single kid’s book.

Donations to these organizations are tax-deductible for Americans. And there are many other organizations large and small that do outstanding work, too.