NEEDS

People give to you because you meet needs, not because you have needs.

I have been involved in humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors in some way most of my life; perhaps you have been too. We must be satisfied that the cause is a good cause, or we would not be involved. The problem boils down to not having enough money in our own blue jeans to cover the financial requirements to accomplish the project. That necessitates the expansion of our revenue base and the solicitation of funds and resources from other people. How shall we do that?

Usually, the plan-of-action statement includes phrases like “Well, bless your heart! We’re just going to tell it and show it like it is, and the people will catch on and respond by giving generously.” Then there comes the hitch. What method shall we use to motivate the prospective giver to join in? There are a few favorite default motivators. You can give guilt, because guilt is the gift that just keeps on giving. Using pictures that are borderline horrific, or at least disgusting, seems to be another favorite method to motivate. The shock and awe may move the hand to the checkbook or the credit card.

Anna Marie and I were in Minsk, Belarus, following the collapse of the old Soviet Union. It was about seven o’clock on a Monday evening when we arrived at Minsk Medical Hospital No. 1 to perform a Needs Assessment Study of the facility. We were there to determine the appropriate medical supplies and pieces of medical equipment to be donated to  hospital by Project C.U.R.E. Dr. Anna Novechenko was the chief physician of the pediatrics division of hospital No. 1. She was a very dignified and competent lady and compassionate about the children and her work. She had been head of the pediatrics division during the unraveling of the Soviet economy and the collapse of their medical system.

As we walked down the old stairway and out into the parking lot of hospital No. 1, Dr. Anna walked with us, holding on to my arm. “Please don’t just walk away and leave me,” she begged. “As you can see, we are doing everything we possibly can to save these children.” Then she stopped us and pointed back to the darkened windows of the pediatrics wards. “There are many children up there who desperately need surgeries. But I can’t cut them open because I don’t even have any suture to sew them shut.” Dr. Anna went on, “There are many groups from the US who come here and take graphic pictures of our terrible plight. And they go back to the US and mail out our pictures and collect a lot of money, but they never come back, and we have never received any help from any of them!”

After many years of observing life and maintaining a mental score card, I have come to this conclusion: If you are involved in philanthropic work in your community, your church, or a special humanitarian cause, and you need other people to come alongside you and help support you with donated time, funds, or other resources, forget about the dramatic shock and awe motivators. If indeed you are meeting legitimate needs, be simple and forthright in sharing with your friends what you are doing to solve the immediate problem with help and hope. Don’t under estimate the discernment and integrity of your potential donors.

People will give to you because you meet needs, not because you have needs.

---

THE ETERNAL GOAD

Haiti’s squalor, poverty, and chaotic governance lay naked for the whole world to see following Haiti’s epic earthquake disaster in 2010. No one could look away and ignore the failed social and economic experiment. Something was wrong and had been wrong for a long time. Of course, I had tears of gratitude in my eyes as I scanned the media coverage and watched the millions of dollars’ worth of medical goods donated by Project C.U.R.E. being flown from the decks of US Navy ships by helicopters directly to the front lines of the terrible disaster. But our determination to help Haiti did not just start with the earthquake.

In 1996 I had been summoned to Port-au-Prince to assess the local hospitals and arrange for donated medical goods to be delivered from our US warehouses. Of Haiti’s seven million people, four and a half million were children. Fifteen out of every one thousand children died from malnutrition, dehydration, infection, and HIV/AIDS.

Dr. Frank Thomas, director of the central hospital, accompanied me on the assessment study. We walked through stuffy passageways, ducking into large open wards crowded with sick and dying people. The tumult and turmoil was reminiscent of war hospital scenes from Gone with the Wind or Doctor Zhivago. There was no such thing as privacy, and one person’s groans or screams were piled upon everyone else’s misery.

As Dr. Thomas and I walked along one of the outside walls of the children’s ward, we passed a closed door. Through the door I could hear the screams and wailing of some tormented soul. I nudged Dr. Thomas with my elbow and winked as I asked, “Psych ward through there?” He stopped in his tracks and opened the door to the outside. The sun had not yet burned the jungle mist from the Haitian morning. At the foot of the stairway was a very young woman kneeling in the moist soil. Her face and hair were a mess. I could tell she had been lying face down in the mud, and the tears had washed down through her dirty face and fallen on her starched, white blouse. The noise she was emitting was not crying. She raised herself out of the mud and began with a low guttural moan. As she straightened up, the wailing crescendoed into an agonizing scream and then into sobs so deep she could have been vomiting.

Dr. Thomas took hold of my arm and pointed back through the doorway and into the children’s ward. “Look over there where all the babies are lined up lying on that long wooden plank.” I looked across the large room and saw perhaps ten babies lying side by side. At either end of the plank was an IV station with a baby tethered to an infusion tube that was connected to a bag of saline hanging from a rusty IV pole. “We have only two infusion stations for the dehydrated babies. They must wait in that line until it is their turn. That young mother’s baby could not wait long enough to receive the infusion. He just died, and they wrapped him in a towel and carried him away. This young mother intuitively knows her precious baby didn’t need to die.”

I looked away from the room and back out at the tormented young mother. At that moment I could not move. I felt her grief start in the back of my head, down over my shoulders, through my thorax and into my abdominal area, across the fronts of my thighs and into my shins. I didn’t just feel sorry for her; I didn’t just feel compassion toward her. At that moment, I owned her grief!

After a bit I could walk again, and Dr. Thomas and I moved back into the hospital and gently closed the door. In my warehouses in the States, I had thousands of IV stations and thousands of bags of saline solution! Sympathy and compassion were not enough; I had become spiritually engaged.

The grief and compassion I had experienced was not guilt; it was a goad. I had been prodded by eternity. From that time on, I would endeavor not to stumble, not to take my ease, but to press on, to push to the desperate locations where the need would not wait for my own convenience. I would endeavor with all my heart to arrive in time in the future so that it would not be necessary for another precious young mother to fall in the emotional mud of despair, weeping for her lost child.

No wonder I was so happy to see those US Navy ships unloading millions of dollars’ worth of Project C.U.R.E. donations at Port-au-Prince! 

---

SHIPPING INTO NORTHERN CONGO

Friday, February 6, 2004: Kinshasa, Congo: I think the Sthreshley family was trying to spoil me because for breakfast they had fixed peeled grapefruit and real French toast.  What a delight after eating rice and leftover chicken or fish for breakfast up north. 

The lung and sinus congestion that I had brought with me to Africa had gotten worse in the Congo.  By Thursday night I had started to run a fever.  Fortunately for me, I had toted along in my suitcase some biaxin, a strong antibiotic product for such problems.  I knew I should not take lightly what I was feeling starting to happen.  Pneumonia could be a killer in the Congo.

Larry and I started talking seriously about Project C.U.R.E. Friday morning.  After spending time with him previously in the Congo and Cameroon, assessing his work and the Presbyterian hospitals and clinics there, Project C.U.R.E. had sent to him nearly $2 million worth of medical supplies and pieces of equipment for his institutions.

He wanted to take me to his warehouse in Kinshasa to show me how he was handling the distribution of the goods.  When the cargo containers arrived he and his people there would break down all the pallets and big boxes and inventory and stack all the separate items on shelves in his warehouse.  From there he would send out or take the needed supplies or equipment pieces to the individual Presbyterian hospitals from his stock. 

Dr. Murray, with whom I had met and traveled before, was working with Larry checking out all the pieces of equipment.  Recently, they had visited the hospitals and clinics and determined where they were regarding their specific needs and what level of medical expertise could be found at each institution.

I was thrilled.  Larry was performing a “value-added” service to everything Project C.U.R.E. was sending and greatly enhancing our effectiveness and success.  I told him that I would like to see his same model rolled off into Malawi, Kenya, and Zambia where his Presbyterian counterpart, Frank Dimmick, was located. 

We raced from the warehouse back to Larry’s office where Rev. Mossi and Mr. Ndimbo were waiting to escort me back out to the Kinshasa airport. 

At 11:05 a.m., I was to take Cameroon Airways flight #817 from Kinshasa, Congo, to Douala, Cameroon.  Pastor Mossi and Mr. Ndimbo were going to see to it that I would be on that flight.  I told them how much I appreciated them and that it really made a difference to have a local get me through the African airports so I could avoid all the hang-ups and bribe attempts.

Flight #817 from Kinshasa to Douala was only about an hour and a half long, but it took about the same amount of time in Douala to unload and return my checked luggage.  I recalled all the years when I never took anything I had to check in.  But since September 11, 2001, everything had changed.  Now security measures in both the US and internationally had made it impossible for me to travel without checking certain things through.

At the Douala airport the workers knew that I was not going to leave without my luggage so there really was no need to hurry and get it delivered to me within any given time frame.

I was met at the airport by a Canadian missionary named Dale but was quickly handed off to a sharp, young, black national named Vincent.  Since it was late in the afternoon and the trip north to Mbingo was a very long one, Vincent delivered me to another missionary guesthouse just across the street from the port and docks in Douala.

While eating with Vincent, I asked if there would be any possibility of meeting with any government or shipping people who could help guarantee our success in getting our containers into Cameroon without problems and without getting gouged with shipping fees, duty, or taxes.

Later, Vincent rounded up and brought to where I was staying a roly-poly local man named Tim Francis.  Tim ran his own company and specialized in receiving shipments through the ports and all the government officials.  I found Tim to be a wonderful and warm Christian who was dedicated to helping the Baptists get their cargo shipping containers into Cameroon successfully.  I told Tim that my old granddad had taught me that it was easier to stay out of trouble than it was to get out of trouble.  I was there in Cameroon before I shipped anything into the country for the Baptists so that I could stay out of trouble and be successful, rather than getting one of my valuable medical loads tied up in customs or with the port authorities.

Tim thanked me for my approach and said he wished every shipper would be as dedicated and efficient.  He then pulled out of his briefcase files showing me exactly what I needed and how to word the different letters and forms.  It was important to use certain words in the official letter of donation, as well as the request for tax exemption. 

Tim was a real answer to prayer.  I had fretted and stewed all the previous week wondering how we would ever deliver the medical goods to the far north of Congo.  In Cameroon I now had an ally who would help us. Tim had been able to do through the Cameroon government what Larry Sthreshley had never been able to do in Douala or Younde. 

Before parting ways, I asked Tim if I could count on his help if I had problems with getting my loads into northern Congo.  I had been thinking all last week of the possibility of shipping the Congo loads into Douala, Cameroon, and taking them across Cameroon and the Central Republic of Africa, then directly into northern Congo since there were no roads to Loco, Wasolo, or Karawa from Kinshasa.

Tim thought that just might be the way to ship and promised he would help Project C.U.R.E. try to accomplish it.  

---

A CANDLE OF HOPE Travel Journals - 2004 Democratic Republic of Congo

Tuesday, February 3, 2004: Karawa, Congo:The hospital at Loco had been built by the Belgians as a leprosy hospital, but it had never been finished or used.  Then in 1963 a Covenant Church doctor by the name of Dr. Carlson traveled to Congo and began working among the people.  He was shot to death by warring soldiers, and later the government honored the request that the facility be given to the Covenant Church as a permanent memorial to Dr. Carlson.  It was a fine facility as far as Congolese medical facilities would go, but oh my goodness, it needed everything!

 In the late afternoon we once again bounced down the dirt runway and headed south to Karawa.  As we were trying to beat the darkness we ran into a horrific rainstorm above the jungle.  Sam, the MAF pilot, was flying our Cessna and for a while we completely lost all sight of the runway, the jungle, the sky, everything.  He almost had to pull up and out of the approach path because we could not see anything out the front or side windows.  Then suddenly there was a break in the fierceness of the burst, and Sam caught a glimpse of the runway and set the plane down in the layer of rain and mud.  We were back on the ground in Karawa.  It was dark as we walked from the landing strip area down the jungle pathway to Keith and Florence Gustafson’s house for candlelight dinner with the two MAF pilots. 
 
I felt great admiration for the missionary pilots.  They risked their lives on a daily basis to keep open the only available lifelines into those remote areas.  There were simply no roads available from Kinshasa to the health facilities in the north.  Part of our challenge at Project C.U.R.E. was to figure a way to transport the donated medical goods into northern Congo.  No one else had been willing to accept that challenge.  But after having been there I was convinced that we could get the goods delivered even if we needed to ship them into Douala, Cameroon, and transport them inland across central Africa and into northern Congo.  I believed God would help us figure out a way of delivery.
 
At about 10:30 p.m. our candles were burning low and our energy was burning even lower, so we stopped our discussion with the pilots and the Gustafsons and I went to a nearby guest facility in the old compound.  There was once again no electricity and no running water.  The only water was in a rusty, 50-gallon barrel, and there was just a plastic bucket to dip the water out and pour it over myself in the darkness of the Karawa compound.
 
Mosquitoes were on the lookout for soft, white, Scottish/Irish meat and blood, so I had to hurry right along and get in under the safety of my mosquito netting over my bed.
 
Over the years of Project C.U.R.E.’s existence God had been gently preparing me to adjust to really bad and awkward situations in the most remote places of the world.  I had slept in Kyrgyzstan in a log house in the middle of a severe winter storm with the snow blowing in through the spaces between the logs and onto my bed.
 
I had experienced thugs in India who wanted to rob me.  They tried to smoke me out of my hotel room in the middle of the night so they could attack me when I came out of the toxic smoke for air.
 
Living without electricity or running water had been my lot in places in India, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, and Central America.  Burma was a lot cleaner, but every bit as remote and primitive as anything I was putting up with in the Congo.  But God had allowed me to gently adjust and be able to cope over the past nearly 20 years without the feelings of panic and fear.  I had traveled around the world enough to know that it was already “tomorrow” somewhere in the world.  Instead of getting overwhelmed by the tough circumstances, God had allowed the candle of hope to burn just a little brighter as each tough circumstance occurred.
 
Wednesday, February 4
I was up at 5:30 a.m. and ready to meet for breakfast with all the medical doctors and hospital department heads.  It was good to also be traveling with the president of Congo’s Covenant Church and the medical director of all the northern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

 Our touring part of the assessment took us until 12:20 p.m.  Following lunch I had group and individual meetings with the leaders of Karawa.
 
The Karawa Township had about 350,000 villagers tucked away down jungle pathways.  Plus, people traveled on foot for many days to get to the Karawa hospital for help.  There were five doctors stationed at the facility along with 35 nurses.  Only about 50% of all the patients could pay fees for their help.  Some patients' families stayed at the hospital to work to pay off their medical bills.  The Congolese government paid nothing to support the hospital or the 48 rural health clinics that fed patients into the hospital.  In fact, the government would send its soldiers to Covenant Church clinics and hospitals in expectation that the church would cover all their expenses. 

The Karawa hospital was the largest of the hospitals I visited but was totally pathetic.  Again, as with the hospitals in Loco and Wasolo, they were trying to make their own IV solutions out of poorly filtered water that was in no way sterile.  They desperately needed a new 20-kw, electric generator to cover their “current” needs. 

They needed almost everything for their surgery room and there was not an EKG machine, ultrasound, defibrillator, sterilizer monitor, ventilator, centrifuge, cauterizer, working x-ray machine, lead apron or gloves or good microscope anywhere in sight.  They were washing all the surgery gowns and contaminated surgical drapes and sheets by hand in an open tub.  I thought, as I viewed, “my God, we have so much excess and these people have absolutely nothing!”
 
But I knew down deep inside me that God loved those village people as much as he loved my successful sons and it was imperative to help them in their need. They had an old autoclave someone had given to them.  But it had not worked.  So, the maintenance people had stripped everything from the outside of the autoclave down to the pressure tank, then adapted it so that they could set it in a pit of hot charcoal to get it hot enough to steam.  It did not thoroughly sterilize even the operating room instruments.
 
When I had walked the halls and different wards I noticed a four-year-old boy whose shirt had been ignited by an open cooking fire. 

The shirt had stayed on him and burned him.  He was sitting upright in an old dirty bed with no sheets underneath a makeshift mosquito net.  His mother was sitting close by trying to comfort him but the hospital had absolutely nothing to treat a burned child.  He would probably die in a few days from infection.  The mosquito netting would certainly not be enough.
 
Another teenage boy was in a filthy bed.  They threw back the covering over his lower leg.  He had a tumor below the knee.  His lower leg was as big as his thorax and almost impossible to move.  “He is not strong enough for us to try any kind of surgery so it just keeps getting larger,” said the doctor who was with me.
 
At one time the Karawa compound had been a thriving community.  Then wars came and even people like the Gustafsons and many of the medical staff had to leave the country.  Now they were returning, including Keith and Florence Gustafson, to try to help strengthen the needed facility.  That was why Project C.U.R.E. was there.
 
As I returned to my mosquito-net-enshrined cot and my rusty water and plastic dipper, I reflected on my experiences at the three different Congo hospitals.  Nowhere else in my 17 years of Project C.U.R.E. had I seen hospital beds so disgustingly filthy, or walls, floors, and ceilings that so desperately needed paint to cover the dirt.

There had not been one working monitor in all of northern Congo.  All doctors, nurses, and medical staff personnel were indigenous workers who were discouraged to the bone.  The only defibrillator I had seen was a monstrous contraption that looked like an electric execution machine out of a Cambodian torture prison (fortunately the thing did not work).
 
At my final meeting with the doctors and head nurses, I made them promise that if I sent them pieces of medical equipment for their hospital they would be trustworthy in throwing out all the old “prehistoric” pieces of equipment that had not and did not work.  Together we would start on an adventure of hope and pride and together we would push for excellence and significance at the Karawa Hospital.  They loved it!  The president of the Covenant Church of Congo, Rev. Luyada, the medical director of the zone, Dr. Mbena Renze, and the hospital chaplain all appreciated it immensely!
 
Thursday, February 5
I was up at 4:30 a.m.   Sam and Rod, our MAF pilots, would be ready after breakfast to take us on our long airplane ride back to Kinshasa.  Keith Gustafson stayed at Karawa so our first flight segment back to Gemena was to drop off Rev. Luyada.  At Gemena we picked up two paying passengers who needed to get back to Kinshasa.  They were two US embassy workers who had been out to Gemena studying the possibility of placing some grants and loans for development in the area.
 
We flew another seven hours in our cramped Cessna 206 jungle flying machine, stopping once to refuel at a MAF base.
 
At the Kinshasa airport I met up with another MAF pilot who had helped me on my previous trip to Congo.  After hanging around with the pilots while they refueled their planes and tied them down, just outside Kinshasa’s main terminal, the three of them took me back to their headquarters office.  It was in the same building where Larry Sthreshley had his office.  As we drove up Larry came out to greet me.  He had insisted that I spend the night with his family before going on to Cameroon.
 
However, Rev. Mossi and Mr. Ndimbo, my official Covenant Church hosts, said that Martin had stayed home from her law school classes all day to prepare dinner for me.  So, it was agreed that I would go to Rev. Mossi’s house for dinner then they would take me to Larry’s home to stay the night.
 
The Sthreshleys and I stayed up into the night discussing my previous visits with them in Denver, in Younde, Cameroon, and Douala, as well as Kinshasa.
 
I can’t tell you how nice it was to sleep in a house with some cool air, clean sheets on a regular bed, and real lights and nice warm water from a pipe in the clean shower stall.  It all felt so good.
 
Next Week: Shipping into Northern Congo   

---

THREE HOUR CHURCH and GRASS RUNWAYS

Sunday, February 1, 2004: Kenshasa, Congo: I awoke at 6:00 Sunday morning so I would be ready when the old yellow Trooper arrived to take me back across town.  I rolled out from under my tent thankful that my new accommodations had some air conditioning.  At the guesthouse where I had stayed on my previous trip to Kinshasa there had been no air conditioning and I had really struggled.
 
The faithful driver delivered me back to Pastor Mossi and Martin’s house next door to the Evangelical Covenant Church.  Martin had prepared eggs, bread, and tea for me for breakfast.  The couple had three sweet little kids ages seven, five, and two.  I was the first white man that the little two-year-old girl had ever seen.  She may never get over it.  Mr. Ndimbo joined us as we prepared for the church services. Pastor Mossi had been a pastor for nine years.  He and Martin met while singing together in a choir.
 
Over 300 of the faithful gathered in the small church building for the service.  But, they all got their monies worth.  The service lasted for over three and a half hours.  I was asked to speak, but my two minutes were not what constituted that length of time.  They had lots of good African, spirited clapping and swaying music, a one-hour sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, full communion, lots of announcements, and introductions and prayers.  But what I considered unique was the collecting of the offering.
 
The deacon in charge of the offering brought out large plastic laundry baskets.  Two women marched to the front of the church and each held a basket and faced the congregation.  Amid hot guitar music, African drum pounding, hand clapping and group singing, the offering was gathered. 

 The church was easily sectioned off into groups by way of the facility’s physical layout.  So each group marched to the front of the church and passed by the two ladies with the waiting laundry baskets.
 
The baskets were changed after each group had passed by and dropped in their offering.  Those filled baskets were then rushed out and the contents counted immediately.  It took quite a time for all 300 people to march by and drop in their money.  But by the time the march was over and the singing of one last chorus finished, a tally had been made, disclosing how much each section had given.  The offering deacon then hilariously announced, amid a lot of excited cheers, trills and hooting, which section had won the giving contest.  Each basket had a total and then they added all the basket totals up.  The announcement of the grand total then sparked a lot more praising and clapping and drum beating and singing.  I would imagine that close to 100% of the people in the congregation had given something.  And as I understood, that process would take place each week.  It may have been the first time I had ever witnessed such “joyful giving.” 

 Following the morning service we walked back to the pastor’s house where Martin had prepared fried fish, rice, casaba roots, and boiled chard for us.
 
I was delivered back across town to the missionary guesthouse.  Upon arriving I was met by two young Caucasian men who told me they were from Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF).  They were there to check if there really was a Dr. Jackson who would be going with them Monday morning in their airplane to the hospitals in Loco, Wasolo, Karawa, and Gemena in the northern part of Congo.  They also asked me to show them how much luggage I would be taking with me.  However much space I didn’t take up in the plane they would fill with cargo to deliver to the north.
 
The MAF personnel coming to my door certainly gave me the assurance that there was a plan for me for the next four days.  I told them that I had flown with MAF over the years in other parts of the world:  Brazil, Zimbabwe, and even in Congo the last time I was there.
 
I was sort of waiting for the ugly yellow van to come and pick me up for a bite of food when dinnertime rolled around.  But dinnertime came and went and about 9:25 p.m. Pastor Mossi and his family came by to talk about my trip to the north and then said they thought it was too late to take me to dinner.  For such a time as that I was glad I had a granola bar in my bag.
 
Monday, February 2
At 4:45 a.m., I moved the mosquito tent off me and went down the hallway to share the bathroom with a legion of cockroaches and spiders.
 
At 6 a.m., a white van arrived with two MAF pilots.  After a brief stop at their headquarters building we honked our way through the Kinshasa morning traffic zoo to the municipal airport.  Even though I was flying with a private carrier, I nonetheless had to go into the terminal and proceed through passport control and all the security functions.
 
Sam and Rod would be my pilots for the next four days.  Sam was from Sweden and Rod originally was from America.  They had both joined MAF as flight missionaries and had been assigned to Congo.  MAF provided a most valuable service to the missionary communities throughout developing countries by enabling them to fly to points within a country otherwise unreachable due to inaccessibility or time restraints.
 
There was no place to get any breakfast Monday morning, and my stomach growled a reminder to me that we hadn’t had dinner the night before either.
 
General Joseph Kabila, the new president of Congo, passed us on the road to the airport with his entourage of motorcycles, mounted 70mm canons perched atop pickup trucks, black limos, 4x4 Suburbans, and lots of flashing lights and sirens at break-neck speeds.  Just for passing by the airport, officials there would shut down the entire airport for a half hour after he passed.  So we sat at the entrance and waited and watched our scheduled flight time get pushed back from 8 to 8:30 a.m.
 
MAF kept three of their airplanes at the main airport at Kinshasa.  The plane we would be using was a single-engine Cessna 206 with five seats and some luggage space, a capable little plane to be getting out of valleys in the heart of the Congolese jungle on mud and grass runways.
 
Our flight path took us north and a bit east.  We flew for about an hour and a half, and then landed to refuel in the small village, Suliaim, where MAF kept a spare airplane. Our next leg of flight took us on north for nearly four hours to the old insurgency city of Gemena where we took on an extra passenger, Rev. Luyada, the president of the Covenant Church of Congo. 

 Another takeoff and another nearly one-hour flight took us to the landing strip of Karawa, a Congo town of about 350,000 people.  Keith Gustafson, our main Covenant Church contact in the north and the medical director for the whole Wasolo medical zone, and Mbena Renze joined us on our little plane as we once again took off and flew to the town of Wasolo.  There, scores of village people came to meet our airplane on the dirt and grass runway another hour and a half later.
 
It had been a full day with over seven hours of flight time to get us from Kinshasa to Wasolo in our small Cessna craft.  It was getting dark as we walked from the landing strip to the compound where we would be staying.  Since there was no regular electricity there we decided to eat first and then hold our introductory meeting with the medical and church leaders outside around the lanterns.
 
Keith Gustafson and I shared a small room together.  Candlelight was our source of lighting, and water was dipped from a bucket.  The people were kind enough to give us mosquito nets to go over our beds.  We were in a “high malaria” area.
 
The Belgian colonizers were greatly influenced by the Catholic Church when the Covenant Church made their request for some ground to build a medical center and church in the old Belgian Congo.  The Covenant Church was given a “worthless” piece of ground almost inaccessible from any of the main roads.  Over the years it had been improved to a lovely campus of rolling hills and beautiful jungle trees and flowers.  The remoteness actually worked to an advantage over the years because during the many wars and atrocities in the Congo, the different armies tended to leave the compound alone because it just took too much effort to go there and burn and kill.
 
Tuesday, February 3
Tuesday morning I met with all the doctors and staff people of Wasolo Hospital at 7 a.m.  Wasolo was an area of about 50,000 villagers, and the Wasolo Hospital had 11 different outlying health centers feeding into the main hospital.  There was no water system for the area or for the hospital, but a public well was close by.  The hospital, over the years, had earned a strong and positive reputation and drew from a much larger catchment area than just the main town.  I discovered that throughout Congo a lot of the surgeries such as caesarean births and appendectomies were performed not by doctors but by the attending nurses.  Nowhere did I see a functioning anesthesia machine. Surgeries were performed with local injection or nothing at all. Dental services at Congolese clinics or hospitals consisted only of extraction procedures.  Deadening was used occasionally if available. The illnesses that most often affected the villagers were malaria, acute respiratory diseases, meningitis, diarrheal diseases, sleeping sickness, TB, HIV/AIDS, anemia, whooping cough, measles, and many varieties of intestinal parasites.
 
Following our tour of and assessment procedure at the hospital, the doctors and healthcare staff all met with me back at the chapel for some very informative discussions.
 
At 11 a.m. Tuesday, the MAF plane met us at the grassy runway and whisked us off over the jungle floor to bounce us into the medical zone of the Loco hospital.  Once again we were met by scores of common villagers wanting to welcome us to their area.
 
We knew we were under time pressure because we needed to finish our work quickly so that we could utilize the final daylight to fly on to Karawa before it got dark.
 
As we made our way in the back end of a pickup truck to the Loco hospital from the landing strip, I really struggled with how in the world those remote jungle hospitals could even continue to exist.  There were 14 health centers or rural clinics that fed into the Loco hospital, but it had been ten years without the use of even the most simple x-ray machine.  They had no dental facilities, almost nothing in their surgery room.  They had never known an EKG machine, a defibrillator, suction pumps, or an anesthesia machine.  They were even trying to make their own sterile IV solutions out of a simple series of fabric filters.
 
One of the nurses told me they knew if they had not done a good enough job on filtering the IV solutions because the children would get the “jerks” while receiving them.
 
There was no such thing as a continual electricity supply.  Patients simply waited throughout the night and a small generator was used if there was a “drastic emergency” for the operating room but the high cost of diesel fuel prohibited much use of even the small generators.
 
Just our “showing up” brought great encouragement and hope to the tired doctors and nurses.  You could just feel the surge of excitement and enthusiasm pulse through the hospital as we walked the halls and talked to the patients, the department heads and nurses.  No other groups had come alongside those remote jungle hospitals.  Hardly anyone else knew them.  Hardly anyone else came.  The desire to help those needy people burned a hole right into me, and I could hardly wait until they received the first shipments of Project C.U.R.E. donations.
 
Next Week: A Candle of Hope  

---

THE OPERATIVE WORD IS "FLEXIBLE"

Friday, January 30, 2004: Kinshasa, Congo, Africa: The operative word that characterized my life with Project C.U.R.E. was “flexible.”  I had been expected to change directions faster than the alternating colors on a traffic light at the busiest intersection in town.
 
I had returned home from Kigali, Rwanda, just in time for Christmas.  I was scheduled to go right back to Africa in early January.  Organizations in Angola, Congo, and Cameroon were anxious for me to perform needs assessment studies in those countries so they could start receiving donated goods from Project C.U.R.E.
 
I continued to travel with two valid US passports, which, admittedly, was highly unusual.  But while on one trip using my first passport I would have a visa service in San Francisco or Washington, D.C., that could hand-carry my second passport to the different embassies and obtain visas from those countries where I would be traveling next.  When I returned home I would simply swap passports and the process would start all over again.
 
The passport service company had received my one passport even before I returned from Rwanda.  However, it had been held up in the Angola consulate because the application was not accompanied by a satisfactory letter of invitation into that country that.  Eventually, we got the necessary paperwork and Angola placed the desired visa into my passport.  But the process over the holidays had burned up a lot of days.
 
The week before I was to leave, the visa service company informed me that they now had Angola’s visa and only needed to walk through the process to obtain the proper visa from Congo.  Previously they had procured my visa for Cameroon.
 
Based on their assurance that there would be no problem with the process at the Congolese embassy, and that they would retrieve the passport and immediately put it in the overnight FedEx delivery, Anna Marie and I went to our travel agency to pick up and pay for the non-refundable airline tickets for the Africa trip.
 
Behold, behold, a problem arose out of nowhere.  As the embassy officer looked at the letter of invitation for me to visit their country he noticed that it did not match up with his country.  “Are you not aware that there are two “Congo” countries and they sit side by side in Africa?”  The visa service had delivered the paperwork to the offices of “Republic of the Congo” rather than what used to be “Zaire,” which is now called, “Democratic Republic of the Congo.”  An easy mistake.
 
By the time the problem was ironed out and I was able to get my precious passport back into my eager hands, our departure dates for the airline tickets had come and gone. It was a very costly series of errors, indeed.
 
Within the time frame left there were not enough days to visit all three countries, so, since it had been the folks in Angola that had caused the greatest delay, we had to notify them that we would need to reschedule our visit with them in March.  We agreed at that time that Project C.U.R.E. would also grant their request to assess some of their additional hospitals located in the country of Liberia.
 
Friday, January 30
Anna Marie took me to Denver International Airport on Friday morning where I boarded United flight #1100 to Washington, D.C.  After a brief layover, I continued on United #958 overnight to Brussels arriving at 7:10 a.m. on Saturday.  We had not scheduled any overnight layovers for the trip so I at once continued on from Brussels to Kinshasa, Congo, with some intermittent stops, and finally arrived at 8:40 p.m. Saturday night with ten additional hours of time change from Denver.
 
On the flight segment from Denver to Washington, D.C., I began to reflect back on the recent success and excitement at Project C.U.R.E. and thanked God once again for his faithfulness.  I was in total awe when I realized what God had done through the simple little operation called Project C.U.R.E. in the last 17 years.  We were now shipping into over 95 different countries around the world.  That was a lot of countries! Project C.U.R.E. was now becoming known as the largest supplier of donated medical supplies and pieces of equipment in the world.
 
One thing that had helped me immensely was having Anna Marie now working side-by-side with me full time.  Since she closed her school, Academy for Excellence, she had now taken the new position of coordinating all the needs assessment operations around the world.
 
Our recent audited financial statements showed that we had been able to run our operation worldwide and keep our overhead expenses to an incredible low amount of less than 2%.  It was nothing short of a miracle!  Most humanitarian organizations would burn up 60% to 85% in overhead alone, which left only a small amount that actually went to the projected needy.
Most of our people, including Anna Marie and myself, would never take a penny for salaries.  It was a volunteer-driven effort and we believed we were making God smile.
 
As you could well imagine, it was just a privilege to be a small part of the historic miracle.  Thousands of lives were being saved, and honor and glory was being brought to God.
 
The only thing I had not totally adjusted to in the recent process was the absence of my mom.  She was fully in love with what God was doing through Project C.U.R.E.  She prayed daily for my protection and for God’s blessing on Project C.U.R.E.  I would barely walk in the door from a long trip and she would call just to see how everything went.  She knew exactly where I was traveling all the time and prayed for me continually.  She rejoiced in every good thing that happened to Project C.U.R.E.
 
It had been about 90 days since God had agreed that she had better come on home to heaven.  Quite frankly, I missed her.  I missed her prayers and I missed telling her all about the good people being helped around the world.  But I did get a sense that she was in a plush box seat in the grandstands cheering us on as we continued to run our race.
 
Saturday, January 31
Upon arriving in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa, at about 8:45 in the evening, Rev. Mossi Nzimba, the overseeing Evangelical Covenant Church pastor, met me along with one of his churchmen, Mr. Sido Ndimbo.  Mr. Ndimbo would interpret from French to English for me.  We loaded into a dilapidated yellow Trooper and the official church driver worked his way across the city to the Kasa Vubu district of Kinshasa.  Pastor Mossi’s wife, “Martin,” was waiting on us for dinner. She had prepared whole-fried fish, casaba, boiled eggs, and some chicken pieces for us, along with fried plantain. 

The meal tasted good and I was appreciative, but it was 11 p.m. when we were served our bananas for dessert. By 11:30 p.m. I was bumping back across Kinshasa in the beat-up van to a missionary guesthouse where I was scheduled to stay the next two nights.  The place was dark when I arrived but the little African guard opened the gates and let us in.
 
My hosts sort of handed me my bags and told me they would pick me up at 7:30 on Sunday morning.  I asked if I was to take breakfast at the guesthouse in the morning, but they didn’t know.  I asked if I would be returning to the guesthouse after I had traveled to the hospitals in Congo’s northern country and they didn’t know.
 
Through the dark hallway I was shown to my cot. Fortunate for me it did have a mosquito net hanging from the ceiling over the cot.  I can’t express how tired I was having traveled straight through from Denver to Washington, D.C., to Brussels and on to Congo without lying down.  I didn’t even have enough energy to think about my nice bed at home in cool Colorado.
 
I had noticed, however, that there was a general tolerance in Africa for filth, or, rather an expectation.  It wouldn’t take much with labor, as available and cheap as it was, to just wash things.  Just keep things clean.  If you were going to wash towels or sheets you might as well wash them clean.
 
The towels had at least been exposed to water; otherwise they would not have been as stiff as a board when dry.  I didn’t really need a towel rack because I could just stand the towel up in the corner.  However, once I put additional water to the towel it would collapse.  But a towel in the Congo was definitely not a fuzzy, warm experience against which you would place your body.
 
If there was mold or scum in the shower it might as well have been scrubbed out.  If the black piece of construction plastic was all you had for a shower door, at least wash it down with some regularity.  At home I would wash and squeegee down my shower every single time I used it.  It was a wonderful and simple habit to get into.  Oh well, I was tired and at least I did have a drizzle of water that came out of the overhead pipe in my new Congolese guesthouse.
 
I crawled in under my mosquito tent about 12:30 a.m. and died.

Nest Week: Three Hour Church and Grass Runways

---

JOY AROUND THE CAMPFIRE

My journeys around the world the past thirty years have profoundly convinced me that if you plan to travel from success to significance in this lifetime, you will do so over the road of compassion. Your true measure of greatness will always be determined by your care for others, not the accumulation for yourself. I know that it sounds a bit revolutionary, but the pulsating motivation behind your drive for accumulation should be the recognized opportunities for making other people better off.

Our medical team had traveled to the fascinating, but terribly needy, country of Tanzania with our free medical clinics. The doctors and nurses on that trip were mostly from the Vanderbilt University community, and we had looked forward to what could be accomplished within the borders of the Serengeti. The night before we were to pack up and leave the Serengeti, we had all gathered to relax with tea and biscuits around an open pit fire at our rustic campsite. Our team had been overwhelmed the previous days by the raw-edged medical needs of desperate people.

I knew that would be the last night I would spend under the starlit sky of the majestic Serengeti for a while. My mind had gone back to the words of Dr. Albert Einstein, “A person first starts to live when he can live outside himself.” Our medical team was totally spent physically but was bursting with joy and satisfaction. They had outperformed their own expectations. They had lived to the limit outside themselves.

We had all been privileged to share the experience of a lifetime by taking the talents God had given to us and unselfishly using those talents to ease the pains of terribly hurting people halfway around the world. There were scores of kids who needed immediate attention for malaria, serious skin problems, or even tetanus. Others suffered with severe respiratory problems, chicken pox, or tuberculosis.

Two days before, we had all witnessed a dramatic episode where our talented medical team had been able to give life back to a young girl who had been in a deep coma and had been carried to the medical site by her grieving mother. David White had leaned over the limp body of the girl as she lay on the makeshift examination table, with IV tubes in her that dangled from the rafters of the dirty building. He spoke softly into her ear, “Little girl, Jesus loves you; we love you. Your mother is here. Open your eyes, sweetie.” She not only opened her eyes, but the next day she walked with her mother back across the Serengeti to their home!

On the last day of our clinic, a middle-aged mother had been brought to us. She had accidentally tripped and fallen into an open cooking fire the afternoon before. She had not only received terrible facial burns, but the fire had also destroyed one of her eyes, removing it from the socket. Nowhere else on the Serengeti could she have received emergency help or medications to relieve the excruciating pain. Our team cleansed and treated the wounds, packed the burned eye socket, and left ample medical supplies and instructions with family members for taking care of the injured mother in the weeks ahead.

The medical-team members experienced true joy that last night, because during the past week, they had been reminded of one of life’s great secrets. If we are to live fulfilled and satisfied lives, we must move outside the tightening circle of our own personal concerns and start investing in the lives of others. There is something miraculous and wonderful about not only giving away your riches but also giving yourself away! In the process of giving yourself away, you will discover the surprise package of true reward and eternal fulfillment. What I hoard, I lose; what I try to keep will be left and fought over by others. But what I give to God and others will continue to return forever. It’s no wonder Einstein’s comment “A person first starts to live when he can live outside himself” makes so much sense! Come to think of it, he was a pretty smart guy!  

---

LEAVING CAMOLOT

Monday, February 26, 2001: Hargeisa, Somalia: I woke up this morning still trying to figure out why ex-president Siad Barre felt it necessary to inflict so much pain and death on innocent civilians—old people, moms, children, and babies. And even animals! What kind of a man would have his soldiers sneak in and poison village watering holes? What kind of a man would allow his soldiers to rape and kill innocent civilians and refugees and then hang their bodies from trees along the roadways? What kind of a man would take his American-made jet airplanes and use donated bullets to shoot and kill fleeing refugees on the roads to Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia? Whether in Africa, Iraq, Cuba, Serbia, or the United States of America, the cult-personality is an awesome, unpredictable, and evil phenomenon. 

The balance of the day was devoted to tending to political matters. At 1:30 p.m., His Excellency, the minister of information, summoned us to visit him again at his home. He is doing a great job of letting the people of Somaliland know that Project C.U.R.E. traveled to Hargeisa to help the country. While at the minister’s home, I was introduced to the “watchdog” lioness.

Ali Waranade had captured the lion as a cub and brought her home with him. At nine months of age, the lioness is already showing her independence and a playfully ornery streak. As I was taking some photos, she decided to see what I was made of. She chomped down on my pant leg and hung on. I was real glad that my leg wasn’t caught between her teeth and my pants. Ali finally got her attention, and she reluctantly let go of me. I decided then and there that His Excellency will probably experience some kind of alarming trauma with the cat before he realizes that lions are wild beasts with a nature all their own, not pets or guard animals. 

At 7:00 this evening, Mohamed and I were invited to pay another evening visit at the home of Hargeisa’s mayor, Awl Elmi Abdalla. The mayor expressed that he would like Somaliland’s president to meet with me. I assured him that I would definitely be honored to meet with the president, but if it isn’t convenient during this trip, we’ll make plans for such a meeting in the future. 

As you may know, the reason I want to meet with as many high government officials in a country as possible is to more completely guarantee the safe and simple passage of our precious medical goods into the country and ensure successful delivery of those goods to the targeted recipients. If Somaliland’s president, his cabinet, and customs officials are all on the Project C.U.R.E. team, then it will be difficult for some junior power broker to mess up the system. God has been faithful to Project C.U.R.E. throughout the past fourteen years and has gone ahead of us to the various countries preparing the way and opening the doors for our effectiveness. 

I’ve only been in Somaliland a very short time, and I’ve already met with the minister of industry, the minister of health, the minister of information, the mayor of Hargeisa, the mayor of Berbera, the mayor of Burao, and the top medical leaders of the country. That amazes me and keeps me consistently aware that I’m certainly not the one arranging the opportunities or opening any of the strategic doors of influence. God is doing it all. My part of the deal is just to show up.

Tuesday, February 27

This was to be the day of my departure from Hargeisa, but it ended up being one of the busiest days of my stay. The mayor wanted to say good-bye, so once again, Mohamed and I paid a visit to his office. Next, Mohamed and I visited Parliament, and I was able to meet a number of the country’s influential elders and was even invited to sit in the Speaker’s chair.

Mohamed established his Somali Aid domestic offices on the downtown perimeter of Hargeisa and moved into a lovely, new office building surrounded by a high security wall. The facility includes a number of offices and meeting rooms and has adequate space to set up small classrooms with computers, where Mohamed plans to teach English and begin a nurses’ training center. He received all the official approvals necessary and is an officially recognized NGO in the country.

Mohamed had asked me to do the honors of officially cutting the ribbon to open the complex. I was more than happy to comply. There were about forty dignitaries on hand for the ceremony. The minister of information kept his word, arranging for a radio station, a television station, and two newspapers to cover the event.

I delivered a very brief statement just before cutting the ribbon. Then we all moved into the building, where Mohamed’s people had prepared lovely snacks at a sit-down reception. There I was asked to deliver a fifteen-to-twenty-minute speech to close out the celebration.

I spoke of the common tragedy the people of Somaliland experienced, and the sad results that have affected their families over the past fifteen years. I told them that it seemed the entire outside world had abandoned them when they most needed their help. Then I bragged on them for what I had seen in their efforts to rebuild Somaliland:

“I see the bleakness of the flat desert sand. We all can see that. But I also see a miracle happening before our eyes. A desert flower is pushing its way up through the difficult surface. It is to be the eventual blooming of a new and delightfully beautiful desert flower, growing in the north of historic Somali country. I congratulate you and encourage you to let the beauty and fragrance of the blooming flower influence all those who pass your way.”

I then tied Mohamed’s efforts through Somali Aid to the goodness that will permeate Hargeisa and spread to the rest of the country. It had probably been a long time since anyone had bragged on them or applauded their efforts.

From the ceremony, we had to move quickly to the airport so I wouldn’t miss my fancy Russian flight out of Somalia. But as we were leaving the new office, I spotted a scene that demanded a photo. In a large, vacant lot nearby, people had gathered to buy and sell sheep, cattle, goats, and, of all things, camels.         

There were no less than thirty-five camels for sale individually. I grabbed my camera, ran quickly to the location, and began snapping pictures. How could I travel halfway around the world and miss what was going on in Camelot? 

I was surprised when I arrived at the airport and realized that all the people who had been at the ceremony had piled into cars and had followed us to see me off. Mohamed is going to stay in Somaliland for another week to spend time with his extended family. I was flying to the country of Djibouti, where I would change Russian planes before continuing on to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

Another surprise awaited me at the airport. The minister of foreign affairs, the minister of the interior, and the previous minister of mines and minerals were there to greet me. I think that pretty much rounded out the president’s entire cabinet.  

---

MAKE SURE YOUR DRIVER IS NOT ON "QAT"! Travel Journal - 2001 Somalia

Sunday February 25, 2001: Berbera, Somalia: Mohamed and I had to make special arrangements with the hotel’s chef to get some porridge and bread for breakfast at 5:00 a.m. By 6:00 a.m., we were on the road traveling to two additional cities—Berbera and Burao. Outside the hotel the fog was so dense that it left all the plants and soil very wet. I wondered if that was the way God used to water that part of the world in prediluvian times. We aren’t really all that far from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and that amount of dew on a daily basis could certainly keep a desert in bloom.

As we drove out of Hargeisa, I noticed compelling reminders of the devastating war everywhere I looked. And yet the people are returning to Hargeisa and rebuilding as best they can. The geographic placement of the city no doubt played a significant part in Hargeisa becoming a great city in the past. Those same elements and characteristics made it a natural trade center, which has created a demand for rebuilding the city.

It took us almost three hours to drive from Hargeisa to the port city of Berbera. On Friday, it had taken us about thirty minutes to fly the distance in the old Russian puddle-jumper airplane. En route, we had a close call with disaster. We were traveling in a Toyota Land Cruiser, and I was reading and writing notes as we drove. The road was full of potholes, and our driver was traveling at quite a pace. The steering wheel was on the right side of the car, and I was sitting in the front passenger seat on the left. To miss all the rough places in the road, the driver was dodging all over the roadway. I really didn’t think too much about it because we were about the only car traveling on the road. 

When I looked up from my reading, I realized that we were traveling on the wrong side of the highway at a high rate of speed. But I noticed there weren’t any potholes in the road for the driver to dodge. As quick as lightning, the Land Cruiser veered off the shoulder with both left wheels in the gravel. I looked at the driver and immediately realized he was sound asleep. I leaned over and grabbed the steering wheel with both hands to try to ease the vehicle back onto the road. The driver’s foot was still on the gas pedal when he woke up with a start. His first reaction was to jerk the steering wheel. Had I not providentially been holding on to the wheel with both hands, the force of that jerk would have caused us, at that speed, to swerve and roll the vehicle. As it was, the driver almost pulled the wheel out of my hands. Rocks were flying, and everyone was bouncing around in the Land Cruiser.

I told the driver to stop immediately. The whites of his eyes were totally bloodshot. I suspected right away that he had been chewing qat, the narcotic from the green leaves and twigs. I explained kindly to Mohamed that I didn’t travel all the way to Somalia to be in an automobile accident. The driver was supposed to be a professional driver, but he obviously didn’t realize the extreme danger he had just placed all of us in. I insisted that the driver get in the backseat and that someone else resume the driving for as long as I was in the vehicle.

Upon arriving at Berbera, we drove immediately to the government compound where the mayor’s office is located. In the building adjacent to the mayor’s office, court was being held for a suspected criminal. The courtroom was open on two sides, and the town’s citizens were jammed solidly around the court building to observe the proceedings. Mohamed told me that the people had been without justice so long under Siad Barre’s regime that they all show up now to watch, and they enjoy the new justice system and the rule of law.

Berbera is a main port city in Somaliland. In spite of the distance from Siad Barre’s headquarters in the south, he used the port during his tenure. So even though Barre bombed and shelled the city, Berbera wasn’t as severely damaged as Hargeisa and other northern cities.

Both the minister of health and my new friend, the mayor of Hargeisa, had called the mayor of Berbera to announce our visit, and he was waiting for us. After we had talked for a while, he invited us to visit the port facilities to be assured that his people could adequately handle our forty-foot Project C.U.R.E. containers. We did go to the port, and I was favorably impressed. During the late 1980s, the United States constructed a very efficient port facility that will more than adequately meet Project C.U.R.E.’s shipping needs.

Our appointment with the director of the Berbera hospital was set for 10:00 a.m. Like the hospital in Hargeisa, the British built the Berbera facility at about the same time, but the difference in the condition of the two hospitals was most unbelievable. The hospital at Berbera was nicely painted white and meticulously trimmed in pale blue. The windows were washed, the cement floor had been mopped, and the staff was smiling.

Dr. Abdi Abdihahi Ali serves as the hospital director. The 175-bed facility is the top referral institution for the region of Berbera. Someone had given the hospital a new computer and taught the staff how to use it. The hospital administration really came alive under Dr. Abdi’s direction. They use the computer to print out financial programs, and they know, for example, that their highest revenues come from the radiology and surgery departments. They design and print patient admission and processing materials, and they told me that if they had additional computers, they would store and print patient records and prescriptions and track department needs and personnel records. I was really impressed.

Dr. Abdi shared with me that a hospital in Italy had come alongside and helped them. Everything changed since that day. The Berbera hospital doesn’t have much more in the way of hospital equipment or supplies, but Dr. Abdi and his staff have hope. That hope flows from the fact that someone believed in them enough to not only give them a computer and show them how it worked but occasionally sends individuals to train and encourage them.

The Berbera hospital, compared to the Hargeisa hospital, is a classic example of the adage “What’cha gonna do with what’cha got?” Attitude and creativity sparked by hope is transforming this hospital. Anything Project C.U.R.E. sends to Berbera, Somaliland, will be blessed and multiplied in the future.

The hospital staff asked for books for their medical library, lab equipment and training, reagents, blood-pressure cuffs, stethoscopes, and any and all medical supplies. They desperately need baby incubators, oxygen supplies, surgical and OB-GYN instruments, and a microscope that works.

For lunch Mohamed and I were taken to the shore of the gulf port, where the restaurant personnel caught fresh fish, split them open, rubbed rock salt into the meat, propped them up by the open fire, and cooked them for us. They were delicious! The freshly cooked fish reminded me of the way fish are caught out of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Basra, Iraq, propped up with sticks, and cooked on an open fire. The Iraqis also use the method of rubbing rock salt into the meat before cooking it.

Mohamed and I had committed to drive another four hours to the city of Burao, where we would complete a needs assessment at the regional hospital there before turning around and retracing our steps to Hargeisa tonight. 

The hospital in Burao was as pitiful and discouraging as the hospital in Berbera had been positive and uplifting. Dr. Faud Yusato Ismail is the director, and I don’t think he had recovered from the trauma of the war. His countenance was stormy and his behavior angry. Years of frustration had no doubt taken their toll. To sum up the condition of the Burao regional hospital, I’ll simply say it was terrible, awful, and worse than you can imagine. They had none of the basic supplies or equipment needed to run a hospital—no IV solution, no gauze or medicines, no functioning X-ray machine, no lab equipment or reagents, and no alternative lab to which they could send tests. In the operating room, there was no anesthesia machine, the suction machine didn’t work, and there were no basic supplies. There was also no working autoclave in sight.

What the hospital did have was sick and injured patients housed in old, dilapidated and unsanitary facilities.

I asked to view the journal where all the procedures are recorded by hand. Many patients were there because of auto accidents, malaria, gastrointestinal parasites, and tuberculosis. I smiled as I read through the list and saw that several patients had been admitted for “stap” wounds by knife. And a surprising number were there because of gunshot wounds. There is still tribal unrest even in the peaceful north.

The thing about the Burao hospital that made tears come to my eyes was the pediatrics ward, where I saw children who had lost arms or legs over the past few days because they accidentally detonated old, hidden land mines. Siad Barre’s war on his own people not only killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians prior to 1991, but it left the survivors with a horrible legacy: children acting as little human land-mine sweepers.

As I stood by the bed of a cute little seven- or eight-year-old boy who had just had his left leg amputated below the knee, I wondered why the ex-president of Somalia, who perpetrated such atrocities on his own people, had been allowed to strut off to Zimbabwe, where he continues to live a life of privilege under the protection of President Robert Mugabe, never to be hauled before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and made to pay for his horrific crimes.

It was a long trip back to Hargeisa tonight, but I was too exhausted to worry about traveling unprotected across the mountains and deserts of Somaliland. Not only was my body exhausted from the punishing journey, but I was emotionally wrung out from what I’ve seen and experienced during my time in Somalia.

Maybe, I thought, fourteen years of being in the worst hot spots of the world is enough. Maybe folks younger and tougher than I might be able to accomplish the frontline tasks and not internalize the sadness and hopelessness quite as much. But by the time I got some hot supper and had arrived back at the hotel in Hargeisa, I had recovered my equilibrium. I’ll be ready for another day.

Next Week: Leaving Camelot   

---

WRETCHED HOSPITALS AND A LION AS "GUARD DOG" Travel Journal - 2001 Somalia

Saturday February 24, 2001: Hargeisa, Somalia: As I was getting ready to leave my room this morning, I was almost overwhelmed by what I had read about and seen in Somalia. Even as I slept, my mind continued to process the experience. During my private devotions last night, I specifically asked God to give me wisdom and favor for the hours I spend in Somaliland. I haven’t traveled to many other places with so much historical grief and apparent need. I somehow feel that if handled wisely, Somalia could be an incredible example of what Project C.U.R.E. can do for a hurting nation by the grace of God.

At 8:30 a.m., I was in the office of the minister of information. His people then covered my meeting at the office of Hargeisa’s mayor at 9:30 and began broadcasting the information about the arrival of Project C.U.R.E. on national radio and television. By that time I was becoming well-acquainted with both the mayor of Hargeisa and the minister of information.

The minister of health, Dr. Abdi Aw Dahir Ali, arranged for us to meet in his office building at 10:30 a.m. There I explained exactly what Project C.U.R.E. wanted to achieve during the hours of the visit and told him that I needed his wise counsel and the cooperation of his hospital directors and staff. I explained my needs assessment, and he briefed me on the condition and organization of the health-care system in Somaliland.

By 11:15 a.m., our entourage had moved down the street to the Hargeisa regional hospital. The director of the hospital, Dr. Deq Jama, was extremely embarrassed about the condition of his hospital and was afraid that I had come to Hargeisa to ridicule the hospital and his efforts. Eventually we worked through the barriers, and he opened up about his needs and concerns.

The hospital facility was erected during the British colonial period and is laid out in a campus style with each department, ward, and service in a separate building. The complex looks pretty good from a distance (say about ten miles). All the buildings are brownstone and are surrounded by a high compound wall.

The real shock came as we entered the buildings. Everything was destroyed or stolen during the war years. And in the ensuing years, the hospital had neither money nor friends to help rebuild and restock it. It’s the primary referral hospital in the region, which means that any cases that can’t be handled in the outlying areas are referred there. The only problem is that, in theory, they handle all treatments and specialties as the ultimate end provider.

In the administration section, I never spotted even one typewriter or business machine. All patient files, billings, correspondence, and other documents are written out by hand on random scraps of paper. Some of the personnel know how to type; they just don’t have any equipment. 

As we visited the examination, trauma, and emergency departments, I was told they don’t even have suture materials or proper wound dressings. Examinations are performed on old wooden tables, and the staff members desperately need lights and the most simple instruments. I kept thinking, This is the best hospital available here for a population of about six hundred thousand people. How do they cope?

Two ancient X-ray machines were in the radiology department in dismantled pieces on the floor. One prisoner in chains was having his ankle X-rayed by the only machine in the region. It was an old, old portable Japanese machine about the size of a shoe box. I doubt it was more than 25 to 50 milliamperes (mA) and hardly strong enough to view a bone.

Sometimes in the old Soviet Union, the hospital directors tried to sandbag me. That is, they would show me their worst operating room, which was mainly dysfunctional, and then tell me that was the best they had. They hoped that by impressing me, Project C.U.R.E. would give them all new equipment. But I don’t sandbag too easily! 

When Dr. Jama showed me his operating theater, I was tempted to think that he was sandbagging me. I wanted to probe the situation until he showed me the functional theater. But in Hargeisa, no sandbagging was going on. There was no anesthesia machine anywhere. There were no overhead lights; no ventilator, respirator, or defibrillator; no monitor; no bright, shiny instruments—nothing but an antique operating table, an empty cabinet where supplies used to be stored, a broken suction machine, and an old pressure cooker placed over an open fire to sterilize their old surgical instruments. 

The laboratory was equally shocking. Their microscope had been shattered, and they were all out of reagent, so even the most simple blood or urine tests couldn’t be performed.

“For diagnosis,” Dr. Jama told me, “we are forced to guess a lot.”

As we toured the hospital compound, we walked past a building with a sign that read Rehabilitation and Therapy. I asked if they were doing any kind of physical therapy for people who were still losing legs and arms from exploding land mines left over from the war.

“Oh no” was the answer. “Those buildings are full of people who have gone crazy because of the terrible war.”

Families whose loved ones had been murdered right in front of them by scores of savage soldiers are still traumatized ten years later. Military men whose commanding officers had forced them to commit heinous crimes, and people who had witnessed their own government destroy hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens simply hadn’t been able to handle it mentally. Most died during the years following the war, but the delayed stress and post-traumatic complications left many incapable of living on their own.

Ninety percent of the pregnant mothers in Somaliland deliver their babies in their own homes with the aid of friends acting as midwives. They only go to the hospital if there is a drastic complication. So a very high percentage of those who do go to the hospital end up dying or at least losing their newborn babies.

Since so many mothers and babies have died at the hospital, it has a bad reputation, and the mothers say, “Why would I want to go to a hospital to have a baby? People who go to the hospital die there.” 

Four mothers died recently at the hospital. One died simply because she hemorrhaged, and the doctor had no suture materials or emergency blood supplies. In Project C.U.R.E.’s warehouse, we have lots of suture material and plenty of blood-transfusion supplies.

When I said good-bye to Dr. Jama and left the hospital, I physically felt as if someone had put me in a huge vise and squeezed all the oxygen and energy from me. One thought kept racing through my mind: Those people had nothing … nothing. How can they continue each day knowing that the supplies exist somewhere, but they just can’t get access? I know Project C.U.R.E. can make a revolutionary difference in Hargeisa if we can begin delivering donated medical goods to their hospitals.

I’m becoming quite good friends with some of the government leaders in Somaliland. This evening I was invited to visit the home of Mayor Awl Elmi Abdalla for a friendly chat and some tea and biscuits. From the mayor’s home, Mohamed and I drove to the home of His Excellency, the minister of information, for a quick social call. His Excellency has a unique home and some unusual pets, one of which is a young lioness that was chained close to the front entry as a “guard dog.”

Next Week: Make Sure Your Driver is not on “Quat”!

---