Our first Thursday in Town

Our First Thursday in Town (11/12)

The first Thursday the team was in town, many of the providers returned to Black Lion Hospital for teaching and patient care. Others went to other sites, and Leo and Mark headed back out to the ROMC site to work alongside the BNCO carpenter and other workers.

Kristen Austin went to a Marie Stoppes clinic to help deal with a too-typical scenario. Someone had kindly equipped the obstetrics-gynecology clinic with a colposcope (a device used to visualize and biopsy the cervix of a woman who might have cervical cancer), but not provided any training on its use. No one at the clinic knew how to use it! Thursday morning, Dr. Austin taught the physicians how to use it, using a flower as a stand-in for the cervix. (How poetic!) She would return the following Thursday (11/19) to provide additional training with real patients in need of colposcopy. Marie Stoppes provides many services that are beyond the planned scope of ROMC (delivery by caesarian section, for example). They said that in exchange for our help with their continuing professional education, they would be able to work out discounts for extremely poor patients referred from ROMC when it opens.

After the morning's work, the whole team gathered for lunch and a coffee ceremony at the Addis Ababa home of BNCO Executive Director, Selam Kifle. Then the whole group went to the ROMC site, rolled up their sleeves, and got busy sanding, painting, and otherwise making the rooms ready for service. That was the night a container of donated items shipped from Seattle finally arrived - after a sea-voyage, delays in customs, and an overland trek from Djibouti. Leo Dirac relates the final excitement, below.

The Container is Here! (11/12)

Working in Ethiopia can be challenging for Americans used to a high-paced go-go-now culture. Things are more laid back here. Relaxed and happy mindsets dominate. Times are often approximate. All this can lead to delays.


Photo by Leo Dirac, available under a Creative Commons license (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2767/4102577600_6a5de5ed8f.jpg)

Moreover equipment we take for granted in the US is often in short supply here. We loaded a 40' shipping container, the standard for international logistics. But here in Addis Ababa there are not very many semi trucks on the roads -- smaller trucks dominate. Hiring a semi to move our container to the site was complicated, and it broke down on the way to the site. To repair it, the drivers had to borrow some basic tools from the clinic construction site -- a screwdriver and a crescent wrench. The last bit of dirt road to the clinic site was barely navigable by the combination truck. All these delays meant that the crane (which was also quite hard to find here) had to unload the container in the dark, which nobody had expected. But with one borrowed headlamp and a lot of determination, we made it work.

Now the container is in its permanent home. Once fully unloaded it will probably be converted to an office. The whole mission crew is excitedly emptying its contents into the building, finishing the conversion of a concrete building into a real medical clinic.