On the Way Home

I am taking advantage of 30 minutes of free Internet in the Amsterdam, Holland, Airport. Since the last post we traveled 10 hours from Kamakwie to Panguma on Sunday. About half of that time we were on some rugged dirt roads, but the rest of the way was very pleasant. Panguma seems to have been affected more severely by the civil war than most areas we have experienced in Sierra Leone. There are many buildings in Panguma that were destroyed by the rebels and are still in ruin, all of them missing at least their roofs. The electrical system in Panguma was destroyed seventeen years ago and the evidence of that was everywhere as well. We met with the town leaders the evening we got there and this time of interaction was very good. On Monday morning we proceeded to walk the town and register GPS coordinates of poles and other entities we are planning on assisting in reconnecting. Just before noon on Monday we then headed back to Freetown where we spent the night at the new Companero Hotel where we had been short of a week ago. We had dinner there and then crashed for the night. Tuesday morning we were picked up by Dr. Karen Asher and her driver, Steven, who took us into Freetown to meet with an NGO contractor who installed some solar at the Kamakwie Hospital in the past. This was a good meeting and we then went to a local electrical supply house in Freetown to survey what kinds of materials we may be able to purchase in the future when these projects materialize. While we were in the electrical store there was an explosion outside in the street and some shattered glass came flying through the open door of the store. A can of Air Conditioning refrigerant had exploded in a parked car at the curb and smashed into the door of the store, removing the paint. Fortunately no one was hurt. Earlier we had witnessed a high truck snagging some electrical lines in the city of Bo and at least one electrical pole came crashing down onto some people at a kiosk and in the street. It did not appear that any of them were seriously hurt. (In Bo, we met with the Electrical Utility that will eventually service Panguma, and this meeting was very helpful.)
Now we are no longer in Africa and having left Accra, Ghana, which was 80 degrees F., it is much colder here in Amsterdam. The transfer in Ghana was a real pain and we will avoid going through Accra on any future flights out of Sierra Leone.
It has been a very good but overwhelming three weeks and we have a lot of work to do to complete our proposals to the five hospitals we surveyed. Please pray that we can keep our focus on them. We are now anxious to be back with our loved ones in the USA and expect our flights from here to be anti-climatic. It is 6:00 AM in Amsterdam, 12:00 midnight at home. We arrive back in Harrisburg around 4:00 PM today, Wednesday. Thank you for your concern and prayers!

Last Night in Sierra Leone

Today we spent a lot of time going over our notes and walking around verifying our measurements. A map of the compound was modified again to more closely reflect the true perspective of buildings and power poles. Tom even climbed up a cell phone tower that overlooks the area to get some good photos of the compound. The harmattan makes it difficult to zoom in on long shots, but we do now have some pretty good photos of the buildings.

We spent considerable time trying to assess the two Autoclave units the hospital has that are non-working. One of them appears to have very little time on it, but upon further observation we discovered chewed wires and rodent bones inside the electrical portion of the machine. So, we will try to get a proper schematic for the unit in the hopes that someone might be able to put it back in working order.

Tonight we noticed that a large amount of the forest or grassland in the distance is on fire. It was very impressive to see, but difficult to photograph as it was after dark.

The wind has subsided and it is back to being very muggy. We leave at 8:00 am for Panguma tomorrow. We will definitely not have the ability to update the blog until we can find some WIFI hotspots on our way home. Please keep us in your prayers. We thank you for following us these past three weeks.

Some Saturday Morning Thoughts

We’re are at Kamakwie Wesleyan Hospital in Sierra Leone in the midst of a four country tour in West Africa surveying the electrical needs of four hospitals that have requested assistance with improving their electrical situations. I’m extremely sobered by the delicate balance of life and death here. Yesterday, a patient went into cardiac arrest; his chest cavity was filling with fluids. With medication, medical personnel were able to stop the arrest, but it was outside the hours the generator was scheduled to run so electricity wasn’t available to power an oxygen concentrator. Basically, without the assistance of oxygen, the man is left to his own body’s ability to fight this physical condition and it’s as if he is drowning as he struggles to get the oxygen he needs. Life is slipping from him.
Last evening, a fourteen year old was brought into the hospital barely alive from a snake bite. While in the forest gathering pine nuts to extract the pine oil, he reached into a crook in a tree to retrieve some nuts and was bitten by a Green Mamba. To reach the hospital, the family had to carry him and ask for rides from passersby. By the time he arrived three hours later, his body systems had already began to stop functioning from the venom. He didn’t live. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered if he had arrived earlier; snake bites are quite often fatal because there is no anti venom here.
So I’m left to ponder, is the value of a human life directly proportionate to the cost of fuel to run a generator so that critical medical assistance can be provided? Medical missionaries live with this reality every day. Or, why are we in America so blessed with advanced medical care and other parts of the world are not? In this part of the world, insect bites, snake bites, parasites, pneumonia, and giving child birth are all conditions that frequently lead to death. At home, we’re almost always within a short distance of emergency medical care, even within minutes at the scene of an accident. But here, it could be hours until the injured or ill can find their way to medical care; often too sick to restore to health once they arrive at the hospital.
Before this trip, I would probably never have equated the availability of constant electric power to life or death. “It’s an inconvenience when there is no power, but we find ways to exist without it”, I thought. But on this trip I see the negative impact that not having electricity has on the third-world facilities that ARE dealing with life or death situations every day. I’ll return home with a renewed vigor to use my knowledge, talents, and abilities for I-TEC’s purpose of “Powering Missions Worldwide”.

Today’s posting by Gene Flewelling

Friday in Kamakwie

Today, we checked out the power line running to the "Swamp Well Pump". The maintenance people here at Kamakwie felt that the wiring running down the hill was faulted. We checked it out and verified that it is OK. But when we hooked up the pump to it, the motor got instantly hot and we removed it. We found out that they had rewound one of the pumps and this was not the one that was rewound. After lunch we went back down and installed the refurbished motor, but this still did not function to our satisfaction. We will make one more attempt on it tomorrow, hoping that we can determine if it is the wiring or the motor itself.

We also spent time today doing more current measurements, and then sketched a drawing of the hospital compound that we can make notes on. Tomorrow we want to walk around the compound again to verify our notes and then we can begin to assess what the demand for electricity will be here for the future. We will base our proposal for upgrading the power on these notes and examinations of the present infrastructure.

We have been eating our meals each day at Drs. Tom and Karen Asher's house. We are very appreciative of the hospitality they have shown us and we are very happy to have come to know them in their ministry here at Kamakwie. We are looking forward to coming back here to build them an electrical system that will meet their needs. This will likely include a significant solar installation along with interfacing to existing and possibly a new generator.

The guest house we are staying in has electrical service to it when the generators run, so we attempt to charge our computer batteries when we have power. At night there is very little air blowing and it is very hot and sticky sleeping. It seems like it rarely gets below 90 degrees even during the night. During the day it has been hovering around 100 degrees with a very high percentage of humidity. It has not rained once since we have been in Africa, except for a shower of about one minute duration. We are told that this is a high malaria risk area, but we have seen almost no mosquitoes since we arrived. Two interns, Laura and Emily, have been staying in the same guest house we are in, and they have taken their meals with us as well. Ryan is also a single guy who is living with the Asher's and we have enjoyed getting to know him as well. The six of us were going to play a game of Settlers of Catan this evening, but they got called away to the hospital for an emergency snake-bite case. We do not venture off any trails here at night and it is not safe for us to go anywhere outside without a good flashlight. We were at the well site today and some local children were playing and working at a garden area when they spied a small snake, most likely a Black Mamba. We did not see the snake, but were there when these boys saw it slithering away. They got very excited when they saw it...

On Sunday we will leave Kamakwie and head back to Makeni. We will be picked up there and taken to the town of Panguma to look at what is needed there to supply power to a hospital, a school, a church and a chief's home. The town has been without electricity for 17 years, having the infrastructure destroyed by the rebels during civil war in the country. Tom was here before to look at the need, and Gene and Gary will get to see it for their first time. This project will consist of installing high voltage power lines. The local electric utility has approved for ITEC to come and do this job, so when funding is provided for it, this will be a future work team project. After spending one day there we will head back to Freetown, where we will spend another night at the new Companero Hotel. On Tuesday we will board the water taxi to the airport and then begin our flights home from Freetown to Accra, to Amsterdam, to Detroit, and finally Harrisburg.

As it is not possible for high speed Internet here, the blog updates are almost exclusively text. We will be totally out of communication from the time we leave here on Sunday morning, until we arrive in Amsterdam on Tuesday, but we will send out SPOT messages along the way, and if you have been checking them before you should be able to follow us on our travels, even though you will not likely be able to hear anything from us in person by email or calls. We have been able to use Tom's satellite telephone to call our loved ones at home periodically, and this has been a real blessing. We have not been able to use the Magic Jack since we left Ouagadougou, so the "free" calls have been nonexistent. What a blessing it was to use that, though, when we did have high speed Internet. It was just like picking up the phone and calling across the street.
The channels of communication available to us all today are very amazing.

Do continue to hold us up in your thoughts and prayers. It has been a good three weeks and we have a lot of information to digest as we begin to assemble proposals for these five projects that we have assessed during our time in Africa. Tom & Linda and another couple will head back to Africa within two weeks of our arrival at home, so they need to get some rest.

Sierra Leone, Finally

We have finally arrived at the Kamakwie Wesleyan Hospital in Sierra Leone. The trip here took quite a while, though.

Yesterday, we left Ghana on schedule with no baggage issues (Praise the Lord!). The flight to Freetown, Sierra Leone, was completely full. The airport for Freetown is located on an island, so after landing, you need to take a Water Taxi ($40.00), which is a 35-45 minute ride. So, after going through Customs, we located the taxi that we were told to use. We were loaded onto a bus, which was also completely full for a 15-20 minute ride to the water. The water taxi ride across to Freetown is very choppy, as the ocean waves were definitely in the 12" range. There were several people on the boat that were very seasick, but they were able to hold on until we landed in Freetown. Once we met our driver from the hospital, he took us through Freetown to the Companero Hotel. The traffic in Freetown is extreme, to say the least! Apparently the population of Freetown is approximately 35% of the entire population of Sierra Leone. It is mass chaos, to say the least. I would liken it to driving in Phnom Penh, except that most of the traffic there is motorcycles and pedestrians, whereas Freetown is narrow streets, cars, trucks, buses, and pedestrians! It is not a place for novices to drive, so we were glad our driver, Steven, knows his way around town!

After being served a large portion of food at the Companero Hotel, we retired for the night and Steven spent the night elsewhere. We got up around 6 AM, had breakfast on the balcony area near our rooms, and then Steven met us to drive us up to Kamakwie. We left Freetown at 8:00 AM and we arrived at Kamakwie around 2:30 PM. We stopped several times along the way, including the town of Makeni where the Wesleyan Church Office is located.

Once we got to Kamakwie, we met up with Drs. Tom and Karen Asher. After having a brief lunch with them, Tom proceeded to take the three of us on a tour of the hospital. The power needs are great here. A generator runs for 2 hours in the mornings and two hours each evening. The rest of the day, there is not power to any buildings. The Asher residence has a very good battery / inverter setup that allows them to have lights and some power most of the time. In addition, there is a solar setup at the hospital that powers lights in some of the wards and operating rooms. These lights are very limited, but it seems to be a good setup. We have been told there are some issues with some of the circuits and we will check those circuits in the next few days to see if there is anything that can be done presently to fix the situation until we are able to upgrade the power to the hospital. The staff living quarters are not very adequate, and the desire is to provide them with some better amenities, like the ability to have refrigerators, etc. We are looking toward the possibility of providing a large solar installation here, similar to what we are planning to propose at Ouagadougou. We look forward to the next few days of investigating, and appreciate your prayers on our behalf.

Internet access here is very slow and limited, so pictures of the time here in Sierra Leone will probably not be able to be posted until we begin our trip home. Please be patient and keep checking in. We sent out a SPOT message today, that some of you should have gotten.

Tuesday Morning in Ghana

After a night of sleep we went to the hotel's restaurant for breakfast. Francis Yawson, the Hospital Administrator from the Catholic Hospital of Apam (www.catholichospitalapam.com) left his hospital at 4:00 AM to come to our hotel to meet with us and share the needs for electrical power at his facility. A mission organization located in York, PA, called Building Solid Foundation (www.buildingsolidfoundations.org), founded by Grace Quartey, has been instrumental in providing a number of services to this hospital, including surgeons and other facilitators to improve the infrastructure of the hospital here in Ghana. Francis answered many of our questions about what direction the hospital is headed in the future, and he will be corresponding with us more as we examine the need. The grid power to the hospital is somewhat stable when it is on, but during times it is off for as much as 8 hours at a time. This is not good when a surgeon is in the middle of an operation. The hospital consists of 105 beds and accommodates as many as 200,000 patients in a year's time. I-TEC will be determining if this is a project the Lord is leading us to be involved in, as we continue to correspond with Francis and Grace. Francis told us that they have devotions with the staff daily, as well as chapel services shared by a Methodist chaplain and a Catholic chaplain weekly.

We are now heading over to the registration desk to catch our ride to the airport and our trip to Sierra Leone is beginning. It is almost 10:00 AM here. We will try to send a SPOT reading for those of you who are following that.

Ghana

Today was a day of transition. We said goodbye to Dr. Peter and Ineke this morning in Burkina Faso to begin our travels to Sierra Leone where our final two surveys will take place. We prayed during devotions this morning that God would give us favor with our luggage for our flights to Ghana. Every bag we were traveling with was overweight and we were flying on a small aircraft. He answered that prayer. Not one word was said and the all bags passed through without a problem.

We arrived in Accra where we will spend the night before flying to Freetown, Sierra Leone tomorrow. We couldn’t help but notice as we landed in Accra that the standard of living is much better than Burkina Faso. Ghana has a very stable government and the people are at peace. We were blessed that our taxi driver was listening to a Christian radio station during our forty minute ride to our hotel. Having the evening free gave us an opportunity to connect with a family from Gene’s home church in Lancaster County, Pa. We met at Papa Ye’s, a traditional Ghanaian restaurant. It was excellent food and we had a good visit as well.

We feel blessed tonight to be staying in a room that overlooks the Atlantic Ocean. There’s something about the sound of water crashing the shore that is peaceful to the soul. Isaiah 51:15 says “for I am Jehovah thy God who stirreth up the sea, so that the waves thereof roar: Jehovah of hosts is his name.”

Posted today by Gene

Last Day in Burkina Faso

We were privileged to attend the International Church service this morning held in a large room of the SIL Mission here in Burkina Faso. Matt Durkee was gave a good message from God's Word and we celebrated communion with these folks, which was a blessing. We met missionaries from all over this part of Africa, and it was good to speak with our Friends In Action friends as well.

After the church service we went to a local restaurant that served most of us Mexican food, which was a treat to be found in Africa. The food service was a bit slow, but the food was very good.

When we came back to our guest house, we again worked on sketches for the beginning of the electrical layout here for the hospital project. We will be working on a firm estimate for this job in the next few weeks, and are confident that God is behind it, so this will be a great ministry to the people of Ouagadougou.

We had dinner with our hosts again this evening, and enjoyed fellowshiping with them. We are looking forward to working together with them on this project sometime in the future.

We will be leaving here Tuesday morning for Accra, Ghana. We arrive in Ghana about an hour after the normal plane leaves for Sierra Leone, so we are forced to remain there overnight to catch the flight to Sierra Leone on Wednesday.

If you wish to check in on the Spot tomorrow, we will again turn it on when we arrive in Ghana. If you care to see what I mean by the Spot, check out the following link:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=12.37819,-1.49042&ll=12.37819,-1.49042&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1

You will need to paste it into your browser as it doesn't show here as a hyperlink.

We are anticipating that with an additional piece of luggage we will all be within the airline's limits. We just need to get up early enough to finish packing (I mean I do..)

Another Saturday in Africa

Today we spent a great deal of time going over the drawings from this survey in Burkina Faso as well as the previous survey in Cameroon. We requisitioned another piece of old luggage that we will use to divide up our baggage and hopefully get it all within the limits of our ext flight on Monday.

We visited a place where there were some artisans selling their wares from BK just before lunch. We have not had any slack time since the start of the trip and an hour or so of walking the streets was helpful. We met some Touareg men. This tribe of people operated the caravan trade routes across the Sahara Desert for over 2000 years. In their culture the men must have their faces mostly covered, but their women do not have to do this - quite different from other Muslim cultures.
We did some minor repairs to the electrical system here at the Van Dingenen residence. Hopefully the circuit breaker for the house will not trip any more. We did experience several hours of power outage again today, but the battery and inverter backup system on the house is very impressive in its ability to keep things going.

We met Dr. Jacob for the first time this evening, and we went over some of the details of the proposed electrical system for the new hospital with him and Ismael and Dr. Peter.

In a few hours we will be getting up and going to church with our hosts, then we are hoping to take them out to lunch, perhaps at a Mexican restaurant.
We keep hearing of snow back in Pennsylvania. We wish some of it could be here as it has been very hot. We trust you all are well back home and wherever you are following us from. Thanks again for your prayers and notes of encouragement.

At the Hospital Site

Today we visited the new hospital site with Dr. Peter. It is a very nice site of about 23 acres in size. Power presently runs into a neighbor's building that looks like a man. We spent much more time discussing the needs with Dr. Peter and determining what might be the best plan for providing power to the site. We ate both lunch and dinner with the Van Dingenen's and enjoyed some casual conversation around the table with them. They are special people who have a real servant heart and a love for these people here in Burkina Faso.
Only a few pictures today, perhaps more tomorrow. Keep checking in. Thanks for following along.

Friends In Action in Burkina Faso

This is Thursday morning. After emerging from our mosquito net cocoons we had breakfast at our guest house kitchen. We spent the better part of the morning with Mark Collier and Matt Durkee. We visited FIAINTL's new office and then went out to the school site where the well drilling equipment is located for the Water Of Life well-drilling that is going on here in Burkina. This was equipment that I last saw at Jake Hitz's shop when it was getting worked on a number of years ago. It was good to learn from Mark & Matt the methods they use in their drilling and how well the equipment is holding up. The generator on the accessory trailer quit producing voltage this week and we did a little examining of it to see if we could determine what might be wrong. Eventually we removed it from the trailer to place it on the ground in a location where it can be worked on. Hopefully we will get to learn a bit about what might be wrong with it, and perhaps even get it fixed before we leave on Monday or give some guidance to Mark and Matt as to what to do with it.

We are going to have lunch soon and will get to meet Dr. Jacob and Dr. Peter later this afternoon. We will then begin looking at the possibilities for projects here in Burkina Faso. There are great opportunities here to share the love of Jesus with these people.

Leg 2 of our Survey Trip

I just posted some pictures from yesterday, but thought it might be good to post some from BK, so that you can see a little of it. The last pics are of the SIM headquarters, not far from Dr. Peter's home where we are staying. More to follow in the next few days.
I will say that it is cool here now, according to Mark. It is a cool 39 Deg. C, which by my calculation is 102 F. It is pretty intense, but inside the buildings it is comfortable. Mark says April is the hot month when it normally gets to around 50 C. You can calculate that...

Moving On

Tuesday was Travel Day from Mbingo Hospital back to Douala. After going over some last-minute discussions and tours we parted company from the Schotanus's and Doug, Hugh, Earl, and Jerry. Our driver, Hygenous, took us along with a large piece of equipment and we began the journey. Along the way in the high country we had to take a detour through the bush because there was an accident blocking the road ahead. This was a rough road and we followed a bus that had gear piled so high on its roof that it looked like it would tip on some of the ruts. Once we got past it we encountered some other traffic that might have had even more problems. But we were happy to get back to paved road.

Coming down off the high country is very impressive, as you zig-zag down the mountain. Once we were on more level land, we stopped to grab a quick snack. We ate some cow meat and goat meat. The goat meat was pretty peppery, but tasty. We left the digestive part of this in God's hands.

As I sit and write this we are in Douala and none of us have any after-effects yet. We saw much culture along the way and some of the photos will give you a feel for it. How about that truckload of logs, Ernie???

We arrived in Douala later than we had hoped, but before dark. Hygenous joined us for dinner at a local restaurant. The three of us had Spaghetti Bolognese and it was pretty good. After walking back to the rest house we worked on positioning some data onto the maps of the hospital complex while it was still fresh in our minds.

I am writing this in the Douala Airport and we are now waiting for our plane to Ouagadougou to load in about 1/2 hour. The sign says there is Internet and there are many hookup cables but none of them seem to get us on line, so this post is going to go live after we reach Burkina Faso. It doesn't yet look like the plane will be too full, but who knows. Getting checked in at this airport was not really fun, to say the least. A guy helped us get our baggage through Ok without paying extra, but he felt he was owed a lot of money for doing it. Tom finally threatened to call Security if he would no let us alone and he fled from us and we then proceeded through the checkpoints to the gate. I will add more to this post in Burkina Faso.

We arrived ahead of schedule in Ouagadougou and made it OK through customs. No one was there to pick us up when we got out of the terminal and while we were waiting a gentleman tried to help us out, including making 4 calls including one to the US Embassy. While we were waiting, Mark Collier from Friends In Action showed up to pick us up. He had Ismael with him, who works directly with Dr. Peter VanDinginen and Paam Laafi Association, who we are here to assist with an electrical survey. After checking in at the VanDingenen guest house, Mark took us to the SIM Burkina Faso headquarters where we got some cool drinks. We chatted briefly and Mark promised to take us out to the local well drill site where FIAI is drilling in the morning, so we will get to see the operation here and the well driller that has not been seen by any of us since it left the US a number of years ago. I will post some pictures of that tomorrow.

While we wait for Dr. Peter to get back from a mobile clinic he is holding about 150 kilometers from here, we will catch up on our work from Cameroon.