DAY 13 - Monday, June 4 - KIJABE HOSPITAL

Off to Kijabe Hospital today.  About one hour north of Nairobi.  Kijabe has one of the best reputations in the country for surgery.  In fact, the man I was introduced to, Dr. Eric Hansen, is an orthopedic surgeon from the US.  I met him via emails about a month or so before loading our container.  As a means of introducing him and Kijabe to Project CURE, I included about 13 boxes of orthopedic and ENT surgical equipment on our container for Kijabe.  Big thanks to Barb back at the warehouse for helping me pick these items and a huge thank you to Bishop Muheria for transporting these items all the way from Kitui to Kijabe.

My goal today is to establish a Project CURE relationship with this facility, operated by the AIC (African International Church).  George, at the warehouse, tells me that Project CURE actually shipped a container about 10 years ago to a US non profit who shares the Kijabe Hospital compound.

Anyway, upon site review, I found Kijabe to be everything I heard it to be.  Quite amazing, it's surgical operations.  Wall to wall people.  Interestingly, they get a large number of refugees from Somalia.  The first hospital I've been to with a significant Muslim population.  The unique problem this presents for Eric is one of translation.  My gosh.  At times, he needs a translator fluent in 4 languages.

This is the first hospital I've seen here that actually has a separate emergency department entrance

Ultra-sound machine

Again, very hospitals actually have an ICU.

The private patient ward is much nicer than the general wards.  1 to 8 nurse to patient ratio.  It's 1 to 16 at best in the general ward.  Rooms are single occupancy and with TV.  Unheard of elsewhere.   But, they actually make good money with this ward, which helps subsidize general operations.

Bethany Kids is a separate US non-profit organization I think, providing specialized medical services to severally handicapped children.  An extensive neuro-surgery department. I think this is actually the NGO that previously received a Project CURE container.

At the end of the day, I am sorry to say this was a disappointing visit.  Given our generous donation of surgical equipment and gesture of good will, my hopes were high.

We started out with an unfortunate mix up in meeting time, so I awkwardly waited around Dr. Hansen's empty house for two hours until we started.  When we did meet, the requisite hospital representatives were not in attendance and I found it strange that we were actually conducting this meeting at Dr. Hansen's very busy personal residence.  This made it very difficult for serious conversation or a business like meeting.

The good news is that we did get a brief tour of the facilities though, which was nice and informative.   See above photos. However, the tour was far short of what we would need to do for a detailed site visit (probably an 8 hour task), which is what I was foolishly hoping for.

I am proud to say that the 12 or 13 boxes of donated surgical equipment arrived safely last week.  However, it was strange to find these boxes in Dr. Hansen's kitchen, unprocessed or inspected by any hospital personnel. I had really made extra effort to get these boxes to relevant hospital personnel in advance of our meeting with the hope that we would have a detailed discussion about them, my primary example and selling point of what Project CURE can provide.  Ugh.  So much for heroics!

Although I believe Dr. Hansen fully understood and appreciated the Project CURE model (he actually had gone to Project CURE's warehouse in Nashville), his function at the hospital really isn't management or administrative as I was told and I wasn't able to talk with anyone who was.  In hind sight, I should have found out in advance the names of the pertinent management and specifically requested a meeting with them, even if that meant meeting without Dr. Hansen while he was still on personal holiday.

I was supposed to stay the night, anticipating a much more in-depth conversation and site review.  However, Dr. Hansen was being called back to assist with patients and there was clearly nothing left for me to do, so we arranged for early transportation back to Nairobi.  Dr. Hansen and I did exchange pleasantries and part cordially.  I left Project CURE's literature with him with contact information, hoping he would advance this information to the appropriate hospital personnel.  However, given the state of the hospital's disorganized finances (they are apparently missing significant funds and still working on cleaning up financials from two years ago) and that the Project CURE container decision is primarily a financial decision, I'm not very optimistic we'll hear back from them.  I hope I'm wrong.

I got back to the hotel around 5pm.  To add insult to injury, they tried to bill me for transportation, even after our generous gift and initially agreeing to pay for transport costs.

Oh well.  Better luck next time.  :-)