Speed, Agility and Power
Close your eyes. Can you hear that? Can you smell that? Ahhhh…
Those are the sounds and smells of summer. Back yard bar-b-ques, squealing neighbors’ kids, the guy with the base who refuses to turn down the volume on his car radio. Summer also brings us anticipated and well-deserved vacations that we have waited for the entire year. What is doesn’t bring, is an end to suffering, misfortune and strife…and sometimes while we’re sipping fruity umbrella drinks, it’s easy to forget that.
This week I placed a call to our Ghanaian contingent to see how things were going at the hospital. The strike the medical staff had embarked on a few months back had finally ended, and they were beginning to admit new patients. What I found out (and indeed, what was expected), is that there was an influx of patients who had been previously denied care (because there was no one to care for them) and now the hospital was back to being overcrowded and the staff overrun.
Our KBFF staff gave us the run down on the numbers: 75 children in general admission, 25 in the ER and 40 in the NICU. Of those in general admission, 10 had been treated and are discharged, waiting for bills to be paid. Fifteen to twenty-five are in the NICU awaiting payment, and between 30-40 child patients are waiting for investigations and lab work to be done before any treatment is administered.
It seemed like a colossal undertaking. Dr. Adei was hard pressed about one little girl in particular, who had been at Korle-Bu for about a week.
“She’s about 10 years old, and we think she has a brain tumor,” she said. “We can’t say for certain, because it’s going to cost a little over a million cedis to do a CT scan, and her parents just can’t afford it…so she’s just here.”
“A million cedis…isn’t that a little over a hundred dollars?”
She confirmed that it was.
The thought of a 10 year old girl sitting at the hospital for a week, with what I could only imagine had to be a splitting head-ache, and not even able to diagnose what the cause was because you had to pay first was unacceptable to me. I told the staff I would be in touch the next day, and immediately put out a call to our members and donors.
I was humbled by the speed in which they responded. I asked each member on our short list to sacrifice $10.00 each today if they could, with the express need to get this girl her CT scan. Within 2 hours, two people had donated that amount. By the next morning, a generous young man from New Jersey had donated the full $100 needed to have the scan administered.
“Wish her good luck,” he said.
Speed, Agility and Power: Usually, we associate these words with sports, and they bring to mind well muscled athletes commanding adoring fans to cheer them on for their amazing ability.
Close your eyes? Can you hear that?
That’s the sound of a roaring crowd cheering on OUR KBFF donor partners who respond so quickly to the needs of total strangers with Speed, Agility and Power!
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