Global Health Progress

Dr. Glenn Geelhoed, professor of surgery, international medical education, and microbiology and tropical medicine at the George Washington University, recently returned to South Sudan. He arrives at Werkok, his third destination, and faces a new set of challenges.

Welcome to Werkok, our third destination in our series of South Sudan missions.  Here the facilities are all new and clean – and look good.  That many of the amenities of the Western World are in place but not working should not discourage a team now accustomed to doing without plumbing or power. This is a result of our appropriate and staged introductions to the rigors of working in an African facility, even one with whitewashed rooms and looking very modern in its facilities.

We have two large Toyota Land Cruisers and a big lorry parked imposingly near the clinic.  That none of these vehicles are functional for lack of the correct missing auto parts is the story of Africa. That they have a generator and electric lights should not make one expect that either should actually be working since in fact they are not, since something unknown is responsible for the fact that the generator does not work and that there is no electricity.  There are solar panels, but not any currently in use or functional, meaning it will be difficult to get any power back into the laptop.  We have a magnificent series of OR tables, one of them hydraulic and in a tilted position, since right now, though new, it is broken.  Our team is looking it over to find out why — that there seems to be a crimped hydraulic line is a good start. But the team has been working on it since our arrival and it has never been brought into a neutral position so that we could actually use it. We have done all our operating on the two gurneys we have placed side by side.

A big, imposing anesthesiology machine is, of course, kept clean by a sheet since it is not working and no one here can figure out the complexities of so sophisticated a unit to discover why it is not working.  But it can serve as a platform on which to set the syringes and spinal anesthesia needles and other items which we know very well how to use.

The quarters are wonderful, and Dr. Ajak is all I remember him to be. One of the two dozen “Lost Boys of Sudan” brought to Canada by Samaritan’s Purse, Dr. Ajak took a nine month course in tropical medicine before returning to Sudan help the people. He has an attitude that accompanies his story:  Sudanese by birth, Cuban by adoption, Canadian by citizenship and a returnee by choice from a land of cool and snowy climate to equatorial Africa where there is no power or plumbing and a chaotic political situation bordering on low-grade civil war.

We have had multiple introductions to each of the workers here and their functions, as well as those of each of my team.  We have a group of patients lined up for us to operate on, and will have many more after this weekend when the church is in session and an announcement will go out that we are here to operate on those who have been waiting for our arrival.

We settled in and were escorted around the buildings and personnel of the stations and were impressed.  It is very well planned, and with just a bit more supplies would actually be a luxury facility compared to those we have been using.

After our introductions and a dinner of goat over rice, our team got to work on what we had seen.  Three of the guys worked on the OR table and the rest cleaned out the store rooms exactly as they had in Duk Payuel and converted them back into examining and delivery rooms.  They are now clean and stocked with the contents of the bags we have carried this far to stock the shelves of Werkok, as we previously had done in Duk Payuel and Old Fangak.