Leave Donations Requested

As noted by Steve at Dead Men Walking, AFSA's (and our) own Daniel Hirsch put the arm out to the American diploblogosphere to rally the (figurative) troops around one-of-our-own who needs-our-help.

The ever-knowledgable Domani Spero at Diplopundit shared a video and a link to the story at the new-to-the-diploblogosphere (but already in the Washington Post) Jennifer Santiago.

(And a tip-o'-the-blog-hat to Ms. Santiago for making lemonade out of lemons on behalf of your classmate.)

See also Cupcake Diplomacy, one of my must-read FS family web logs. As she put it:

"I have a friend at work named Hannah. She is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met and pretty much from day one I admired her ability to charm and disarm an entire room full of people without saying a word. She has an utterly infectious laugh, she is brilliant, and she is driven. She is also suffering from what is called a thymoma, a rare type
of tumor in her chest. In her case the tumor is rather large, which is
especially bad since she’s a pretty small person.

After 6 grueling weeks of chemotherapy, Hannah found out last week that the tumor did not respond to the chemo…it actually got bigger. In spite of the bad news from her doctor, she is still smiling, perky, and motivated to kick this thing to the curb.

Here’s where (some) of you folks come in. I know that a pretty large number of you are federal employees and luckily for Hannah, the federal government has a government-wide leave donation program. Today, I’m asking you all to please consider donating some leave to Hannah so she can get the surgery and treatment she needs without losing
pay. I know the summer holidays are coming up and many of you have plans for your leave, but I’m going to climb up on my soap box for a minute and appeal to your good conscience, your kindness, and your compassion. Please help my friend."

Her A-100 class, the 162nd, is digging deep into its Annual Leave pockets but, being junior officers, those pockets are pretty shallow so far.

Here's how to donate leave (swiped, without apologies, from Diplopundit):

State Department Employees:

Email, fax, or mail form DS-1862 (found via intranet) to the address found in the leave donation request announcement found here. [Note: you must be able to access DoS intranet for this link to work]

Employees of other federal agencies:

Fill out form OPM 630b and then have someone from your agency’s HR sign and date the bottom part of the form. You’ll need the name of the State Department contact in HR as well as some info about Hannah, but I’d rather not have that just floating around the internet so please email me at cupcakediplomacy AT gmail DOT com and I will get you the necessary info ASAP.