Inside Mbingo Baptist Hospital

Let me take you on a tour of Mbingo Baptist Hospital and introduce you to some of the people here.  Sam Nigo is one of the PAACS surgical residents that I am working with here at Mbingo.  When he told me that he was from the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), I asked him if he knew some of my friends who have worked at Nyankunde Hospital there.  It turns out that his father was the head laboratory technician there and that he knew all of my friends.  We operated together for several cases this week.

For those of you who know how an operating room functions, usually there is some type of a main board which tells which patients and surgeons are in which room and the type of surgery which is being performed in that room.  There is always someone in charge of "running the board."  Here is the gentleman who runs the board at Mbingo, and he takes great pride in running things efficiently.

This is one of the nurse anesthetists carrying a young child in for surgery.

During the morning the residents of the internal medicine and surgery programs take a break to enjoy chai tea and light pancakes.

Dr. Carol Loescher is an ob/gyn physician who comes to the hospital for one week a month.  She and her family lives a few hours away.  Here her daughter Lydia and her son Eddy walked with our family over to our house for a game night.  

Early this morning the phone rang before sunrise.  These twins were in the wrong position for a vaginal delivery, and so Dr. Carol and I did a cesarean section.

Jackie is the nurse in charge of the operating room.  Yesterday our children helped her to unpack all of the surgical instruments that we had brought with us, along with other donated instruments.  They arranged them on these tables and were busy making new surgical trays for various types of surgeries.  Needless to say, she was extremely grateful for the hundreds of surgical instruments that our supporters had helped to purchase and donate to the hospital.  Many of the surgical instruments that are in the current surgical trays are decades.  To have brand new surgical instruments is an incredible gift and will be a blessing to them for years to come.