This is Jackson Doe Memorial Hospital. It is one of the larger hospitals in the country. It is located in the middle of nowhere. It took us 7 hours to drive from Monrovia to the hospital. Two of the hours were on bumpy dirt roads. It was built to serve the rural corner of the country. It is located in a town where all of the buildings are just Shacks with metal roofs.
They contacted us and requested help to obtain equipment. The hospital is 12 years old and all of the equipment inside is 12 years old. They have not had a budget to replace anything. A lot of stuff is broken.
It is always the suffering babies that put a real face on the reality of the problem. This is the maternity intensive care area. A lot of things didn't work in here such as heart monitors, ultrasound equipment, and suction equipment.
They wanted us to tour the operating area so we had to get dressed up.
Here's mainly what they want us to see. This is an operating table that doesn't go up or down or tilt on its side. They would like one that works.
They treated us like we were important. This is all the department heads in the hospital. We had a pre and post visit meeting with all of them. We told them going in that we were only prepared to spend about $70,000 on this first project with them. They actually could use about 10 times that amount. Still money is so tight in the country that that was a big deal to them.
These doctors are amazing. They live in horrible conditions. Have very modest pay. Have very limited equipment. Yet they are sincerely concerned for the welfare of their patients and serve here as a duty to the country.
We initially felt good when we learned that they had Hospital provided housing. They have to do this because there's really no suitable housing in the town. This is our room. It did have air conditioning. The pillows felt like they were stuffed with some sort of shredded paper. The bed was just a thin mattress that was so saggy. At bedtime we heard an animal sound in our room and couldn't find it. So we pulled our bed away from the wall and slept in the middle of the room. We had no bug bites in the morning so we felt good.
Our bathroom didn't look so bad until we found out that the only water that worked was the shower head. We had to use that to fill a bucket to flush the toilet and drain the sink.
It was a beautiful drive through the jungle. This is one of the better graded areas of the road. We felt safer because we had Emmanuel Tarpay Who is the member humanitarian manager for the country was with us.
We visited another Gathering Place program in the Painesville stake. It was amazing. It starts at 2:00 in the afternoon and goes until 6:00 every Friday. The first hour is Institute class and missionary lesson class. The remaining 3 hours is skill training in pastry baking, cosmetology, soap making, sewing, self-reliance training and something called bead making where you make ties and purses and various clothing articles out of beads.
They have over 200 attend. About half of them are not members of the church. The program's only been going for 4 weeks so far. No drop off in attendance. All of the teachers of the different classes are professionals in their field. Everything is free of charge. This is a picture of the meal that was provided afterwards.
We ate at the rooftop restaurant on one of the nicest hotels in the country. We were feeling brave so we ordered sushi. We did not get sick.
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