Welcome to Bere! -- Tchad, Africa

Saturday, May 5

After 4 weary days of travel, we finally made it to Bere yesterday at 2am. It didn’t take us long to take long-awaited-for cold showers and get to bed. The next morning we were given a tour of the hospital compound. We saw the patients and their families laying on mats outside under bits the bits of shade the scattered trees provided. The nurses and nursing students were doing their rounds in the pediatric ward as Danae was rounding on her post-op patients. In addition, we toured the lab, the pharmacy, the OR, the inpatient beds, labor and delivery; the common pattern was the hospital’s bare-bones resources, scarcity of staff, and tremendous number of patients waiting to be seen.

While touring the recovery ward I met a little boy, maybe 8 years old, who had already been in the hospital for over a month, receiving daily dressing changes on his leg wounds; he smiled as he saw us approaching and extended his skinny little arm to shake my hand as I was introduced. His smile broke me and at that moment the overwhelming needs and sense of injustice at the paucity of resources here during our relatively brief morning tour had me swallow back tears that already welled up in my eyes.

After the tour, I remained in the OR while Matt was whisked away to help with a maintenance job.