New Kru Town

After a night of little sleep, we were up and out of the house by 7am on our way to a new clinic at New Kru Town, which is a suburb of Monrovia. We drove for 45 minutes in a hospital van that picked up staff on our way there. It is in an area a lot like the slums of West Point, shanties with tin roofs crowded together with people selling their wares out in front.
We heard Viola speak, who is charge of the PMTCT (Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission) program. Her audience was filled with young girls ages 13 and up who were pregnant. Some had been there before and some for the first time. She explained all about how HIV was passed from Mother to child and how testing and treatment could have a big effect on whether or not their unborn child would contract the disease from them.
Later in the afternoon, we started taking an inventory of all the larger equipment in the hospital. We went through all the departments and looked for serial numbers, etc. on everything from computers to ultrasound machines. This hospital is located about 150 yards from the Atlantic Ocean and we are still in disbelief about the damage that the sea air and humidity can cause. Almost everything we looked at had rust and horrible corrosion on it. Equipment such as X –Ray machines are rendered useless after merely five years. There is so much broken equipment laying around that I would be totally discouraged if I worked here, but the Liberian people are used to being very patient and they seem to have an eternal optimism that something might start working again, so they better not throw it out just yet. We are slowly peeling the layers of the onion back as we find out more about how things work over here.

Interesting Observations
Food – Palm oil is orange and used in just about everything. They eat the greens of the potato plant as well as the potato. We usually have rice with every meal and some kind of meat or fish or both with gravy and most of the time we can’t tell what it is until we put it on top of our rice and cut into it. We have had meatloaf with a boiled egg in it with potatoes, omelets with ham and french fries, chicken and meatballs in gravy, etc. Dr. Sanvee’s sister cooks for us and the driver’s deliver it at mealtime or within an hour or two of mealtime. The fruit we have eaten includes oranges with very green tough skins (but pretty good fruit inside) and bananas. I have started adding a fruit salad to our dinner menu to give us a little more variety. We did get a tossed salad the other night, but made the decision not to eat it for fear of getting sick. Any leftover food goes to our driver, which he is glad to get. As of yet, we have not had fufu (cassava) which I hear is no treat and all starch and we have not seen barracuda (which they buy dried), but I hear could show up.
Stores – Everyone here has something to sell. You can buy lingerie out of a wheelbarrow (which is a moving store), bolts of beautiful cloth, trinkets, nuts and bolts, coconuts and just about everything in between. Sometimes it is in a big plastic bowl on top of someone’s head or in a large shipping container turned into a storefront. We found out that vendors can find you anywhere. The other day we had a knock at our door and it was a man asking for Dave. He had talked to him at the supermarket about his carvings and he saw our van marked St. Joseph’s. Sure enough he showed up at our door, selling his pieces. Yes, we bought several carvings (it is really hard to say no, although with so many asking it is getting easier) On another day, Shelly and I were found by another man who came especially to the hospital to sell us bracelets. We told him we were not interested, but practically had to hurry to our house so he wouldn’t know where we lived. The word is out that there are white people at the hospital with money.
At the supermarket they had a good selection of food, but basically no dairy products except a few cheeses. It did however have beer, wine and a huge assortment of powdered milk. Quite a bit of what we brought could have been purchased here.
Weather – We have had heavy rain with thunder and lightning, light rain, cloud cover and bright sun. All with lots of humidity, but it has never been during a time that it bothered us or we had to be out in it. We have not opened our umbrellas, yet.
Hospital Compound – There is a hospital, maintenance buildings, warehouses, housing for doctors and some nurses and their families, canteen, housing for the Brothers & Sisters of St. John, a coconut grove, a morgue, laundry, and after school care for worker’s children and visitor’s children. Along the road to the entrance are various vendors selling their wares. Everywhere there is vegetation, including trees and bushes with beautiful flowers.