by Fenton Rees
September 29, 2015
Sometimes when you recommend that someone does something you get to help them do it, Ha ! I (Fenton) was here at Bongolo Hospital for 10 days this last February with a team from eMi, (Engineering Ministries International), to help them fix some of their issues and plan out improvements for the next 5+ years. One of their issues was all kinds of electrical problems;- from electrical fires and people getting shocks, to having far too much of their expensive / hard-to-get medical equipment fail from voltages surges and the effects of lightning. One of the solutions was to supply the sensitive / expensive equipment via what is called a Constant Voltage transformer (CVT). I won’t bore you with the details, but they are really the gold-standard for this type of poor power quality problem. In countries like the US, the electrical system is usually so relentlessly stable and available; we forget what a blessing it is. Here at Bongolo, we do have a hydro dam just across the river and a back-up diesel generator, so it’s available almost 24/7;- but it is just not that stable.
The eye clinic has some very expensive equipment, (and does 70% of the eye ops in the entire country), so that was going to be the first building to get a new CVT, which arrived from the US via container a couple of months ago. (It is way too big and heavy for checked baggage). As I was one of the ones recommending such, they thought it was best for me to help install it. So this has become my “Job #1”, that’s FORD lingo for the most important thing to get finished before I leave here at the end of October, (I worked at Ford many years ago).
CVTs do many things well, but they are not the perfect solution;- they don’t handle things like air-conditioners that draw a large surge of current when they first start up. And new A/C units are available here, so it is not as critical to protect them. So the electrical system of the eye clinic has to be partitioned so that the air-conditioners are not connected to the CVT. That meant getting up in the attic with all the wiring and what I feared to be the snakes and scorpions. I had help from one of the Gabonese maintenance guys (Olivier), but felt it unfair to send him places I didn’t want to go, so up I went too. He was far more agile than me, so I let him get to the most difficult to get to place, photo. (That also meant that if things went wrong it would be him crashing thru the ceiling and not me, Ha). Fortunately no critters, just tons of cobwebs and lots of heat.
Some of you might remember Alliance & Cynthia from Burundi;- he is now in his 3rd year of a 5 year surgery residency. About this time last year one of their twin daughters died;- she had neural tube defect and was not expected to live that long. Anyway, they are doing well, as is the other daughter.
Bongolo Hospital is the ONLY hospital that can do a blood transfusion in a 3 county area, (there are 8 or 9 counties in the whole country).
They had a sick baby that needed a blood transfusion and Pat was a match for the blood type;- the baby would have died without it. “The life is in the blood”;- where have we heard that before ? There is no such thing as a blood bank here, if you have to have surgery and need a transfusion, you need a “walking blood bank” to come in with you.
Well that’s about all for now,