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