Trying to help a hospital and three schools

We are pursuing a project with the National Hospital to provide neonatal equipment and to renovate their neonatal Intensive Care Unit. We had a tour of the area today and it was shockingly sad. In the picture above there are two babies in this incubator that is built only for one.

 In this picture the small premature babies are lying in these warming units only that the warming units do not work. Our project will supply more incubators and warming units.

In addition to equipment we will completely remodel the neonatal Intensive Care Unit so that it will look like new. We will also remodel two operating rooms and build a new operating room in the delivery room so that mothers in distress can have surgery performed quickly without having to be transported to another part of the hospital. Never have I felt so strongly that our money will be well spent.

The pictures do not do justice to the general infant care area. The walls and floors and ceiling are all deteriorating. One of the operating rooms we will refurbish doesn't have a working operating table light so it cannot be used.

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In Liberia public schools are tuition free. Private schools charge tuition and are generally better schools. Tuition is only about $200 a year, but that is a substantial burden. The government is trying to improve their schools and to provide a quality free education

We met with the assistant minister of Education a few weeks ago and he gave us a list of 10 public schools that were most in need of Rehabilitation. Each of the schools have about 1,000 students attending in 2 shifts. One of the schools has about 150 adults that go to night school in it.

Two of the three schools we visited were packed. Desks are placed so tightly together there are no isles for the students to leave the room.

The schools usually don't have any windows and never any screens. If you notice on the left hand side of the picture above they usually use decorative blocks that let air and light through.

The bathrooms at all the schools were in poor condition. This is by far the best one (even with the missing toilet seat). The toilets never flush rather you bring a pail of water and pour it into the toilet bowl to clear it out.

The roofs on all of the schools leaked.

This is typical of the quality and maintenance. None the schools had any electrical. The one school that has a night school has a generator that will run one light bulb in each class.

We are getting contractor bids to rehabilitate the three schools. We will put in new desks, new doors, new bathrooms, new hygienic water wells, new roofs and patch the concrete floors and walkways. It depends on how the bids come in to determine how much we can do. Materials are fairly expensive but labor is usually pretty inexpensive.

The plan is once the rehabilitation is complete the amount of students will grow significantly because families will pull their children out of the private schools.

We are standing on top of a two-story school building that was planned to be three stories but never completed. They left it without a roof and so water leaks down into the lower two floors. We plan to install a roof.

Today we went to the Harbell branch. For Sacrament meeting they showed the Sunday morning session of conference. Conference was 2 weeks ago but Liberia usually doesn't watch it till the following week because of the time difference. The Harbell branch was planning to watch it last week but technical difficulties made that impossible. 

They are the one branch we go to each month that has electricity. Electricity is supplied by a generator.  It seemed remarkable that somehow General Conference could reach this small branch that's located in a rubber Plantation. It was really hot inside the chapel which explains why the young man sitting in front of us looks like he was asleep.