May 2011

Petra and I are on our way back to work in Sierra Leone after spending a month visiting friends and relatives and loading a 40’ container with our vehicle, some personal effects and most importantly, the first hospital beds and other hospital equipment for the Mokanji Hospital.  As you can see on our website, the current equipment at Mokanji is very old and not in the best of condition.  Thanks to the Sunrise Rotary Club in Cranbrook, B.C., we were able to obtain 4 fully manual hospital beds, two patient gurneys, non-powered patient lifts, commodes, walkers, wheelchair, bedpans, bedside tables and all other assorted hospital equipment so we have some basic equipment to use at the hospital when we are able to receive our first patients.

We also loaded our trusty Toyota LandCruiser into the container and it will continue to serve us while we are in Sierra Leone as our vehicle to allow us to do our work.  Petra will likely make the most use of it as she’ll be able to travel to the various villages to provide health care without trying to coordinate with my schedule and she’ll be able to bring more than simply one small duffle bag of equipment and medications.  It will also no doubt be pressed into service as an ambulance when someone is injured or sick and needs transport out until we are able to look after them in the Mokanji Hospital and as a vehicle to help when short term teams come.

Our initial three months stay helped us to get a better handle on what sort of items we’d need or like to have to allow us to live a little easier when we move into Mokanji next to the hospital.

One must remember that Mokanji has NO water service, NO electrical service and poor internet service through the cell network only.  You could say we’ll be moving “off grid”.  Petra and I decided that rather than run a generator whenever we’d like to have lighting or charge the cell phone or computer, let’s see what is out there, that might allow someone to truly live “off the grid”.  We have obtained solar panels, charge controllers, deep cycle batteries, inverters and LED lights.  With this we hope to be able to have lights and a small amount of power available to charge the various electronic devices we all seem to have a hard time doing without like the cell phones and computers and we hope to do this all without the need of running a gasoline generator all the time.  If the cell phone internet is upgraded a little we might even be able to have our Vonage phone service again!

We are hoping that this system will allow us to keep the generator operation limited to only a half hour or so in the morning and evening in order to cool our small refrigerator.

One of the first projects that I’ll be working on when we are back in Sierra Leone at the end of May is the solar powered well pump and water system.  We have drilled many wells including several in Mokanji but of course these are all operated with a hand pump which is not practical for a hospital.  For the hospital, and fortunately also for our house, we’ll have a raised water tank which will give us pressurized water all day and allow us to actually have modern conveniences like a flush toilet!

All of these projects will also help us get ready for the next family that is coming to join us in Mokanji.  This is a young family from the Chicago area with three young children.  The parents are a nurse practitioner and a physician’s assistant, two folks we can really use in the Mokanji area.  Petra and I are hoping that we will be able to get our house in order well enough and to make it feel like home so that we can better prepare for this family as well.

The things that we in the west take for granted and often don’t even give a second thought to can be quite significant and we don’t want to scare anyone away because of the inconveniences of living out in “deepest darkest Africa”.  Imagine, we’ll be doing all this while being “green” at the same time!