On Monday Joseph and I visited a warehouse used by Rotary to store equipment that has been donated for use in developing countries. We were accompanied by Ros Stafford-Green who is both an endorsed Church of Christ minister and has expertise in obstetrics – just what we needed considering we were looking for equipment to provide the midwives in Aweil with a basic medical kit they can carry as they move into the remote areas.A few months ago I walked around Aweil Civic Hospital with Joseph. The hospital has almost no equipment, no nurses, no doctors, no medicine. I felt like Ezekial who in his vision of the valley of dry bones was asked “Can these bones live?” (Ezekial 37). I wondered to myself “Can this skeleton of a hospital be brought back to life?”
In stark contrast, Rotary’s Donations in Kind warehouse has more surplus medical equipment than I could imagine. And not only medical equipment! School desks, stationery, electrical equipment, wheel-chairs, library books, sewing machines, type-writers… Joseph said he would like to take it all and put it on a ship to Sudan. The fact is we throw away more equipment than most people in Sudan will ever lay eyes on.
The medical kits are a small start. Deborah and Ang’er (pictured) have asked us to provide fifty kits for the women Deborah has been training as midwives. They were the only people in the hospital that I saw providing any medical care at all. If we can also provide some other medical equipment to help them establish a small maternity ward I believe it could be a small step toward bringing the hospital back to life.Obviously there is a lot to do. Let me know if you are interested in being involved. You will see I have added an email link on my profile section, so now if you don’t want to post a reply for the whole world to see you can send me an email instead.
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