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.