Progress...maybe

Today was an interesting day. It started out slowly enough. Being the weekend, most of our colleagues back home were off, which slowed down the communication and gave us all a little bit of breathing room. There’s still a bunch of shipments coming in we’re trying to coordinate, as well as teams coming and going, but it’s all starting to come together a little more.

 

Then the curve balls started coming. First, there was the team of almost 20 that showed up, unannounced. Not from MTI or one of our partners, but planned by the Haitian woman who is normally in charge of the hospital. This is the SECOND time this has happened. The teams have been more than happy to move on to other locations where the needs are just as real, but it shows underlying communication and trust issues. I heard “I don’t want to talk to you, I want to talk to a Haitian” more than once today. I don’t know what more we could do to gain trust, but, apparently, there are at least some people who are struggling with that.

 

After that resolved, and before they came back for a second discussion, some boys from the US Army showed up. Turns out there’s a WHO depot with tens of millions of dollars of medical supplies a 3 minute walk from our hospital. They’re there to protect it and help with distribution. So they wanted to know what we need. I believe the exact instructions were to make a wish list and they’ll see what they can do. This is HUGE because we have some very specific, and hard to come by, needs. They can also help us with some facility needs, like repairing the security wall around the compound and finishing the electrical on top floor of the building. They also have a helipad (well, landing area), which comes into play because of the news we got last night.

 

Bill and Dr. Dan have been working on a number of partnerships, not the least of which is with the US Military, specifically the USS Comfort that’s here treating patients. They’re doing a lot of surgeries, but their capacity is limited by their ability to transfer patients out to other facilities, making room for more. We’re now in a position to take a large number of those patients, which they would deliver via helicopter. This also gets us into the military supply chain, which helps us out a ton. If we’re their partner, they’ll make sure we have the things we need.

 

This, of course, means the hospital will be growing. Which means we’re all going to be a lot more busy.