Chidamoyo Hospital in Zimbabwe

We started this week by welcoming many visitors to Chidamoyo Hospital.   On Sunday evening, the 22 nd of February Dr. Stephanie Huang from Santa Rosa, CA   arrived with her 2 sons Julian and    Lucas  .   Stephanie who is an ENT surgeon came last year in June and said she really wanted to come back with her sons and so we are happy to welcome them for 2 weeks. Every Monday morning we have Viral Load draw day for our 5,249 patients on ART.  the viral load tells us if the medication is working to control their AIDS and if they are taking their medicine.  We start drawing by 0645 and at 0800 Major comes to do devotions for us.  This has been a special time of encouragement for our patients. Monday morning we welcomed a team that had come to visit Martha and Fanny Nyamutora, who minister in Gweru.   Fanny’s home village is down at the end of our airstrip.   He had a team of American ladies that had come out to help with a Women...

This past week was busy here as we tried to finish off our month end reports and see our patients.   It was a busy week with many patients and Tyler, our medical student helped with 4 C/Sections in less than 16 hours!   He was happy! On Thursday and Friday a Health team came to conduct a workshop here to teach us how we are going to be reimbursed for the amount of work we do in the future.   Since we see a lot of patients we do hope to benefit from this program and we hope it brings us funding for the hospital that we have not had for 2 years and 7 months.   As we were involved with this training we all had to go in and out to see our patients and keep the hospital moving at the same time, so we were going early and coming home late to get both done. We celebrated Dr. Isala, our Medical Superintendent’s, birthday with a cake during lunch at the meeting.   Everyone got a bite of cake to celebrate.   He has been with us 4 years this...

On the 29th of  March we had a retirement lunch for all our staff at the hospital to honor 2 staff who were retiring at the end of March. Mr. Wise Makaza, our driver for 12 years and Mrs. Patricia Tapfuma, a Nurse Aide for 28 years and work in the Pharmacy retired.  We had a wonderful lunch and Major and his family sang and we gave them each 100 broiler chickens with fencing and chicken food to get them started in raising chickens to sell.  We also gave them $100 each in cash for their service to us. On Friday the 30th through Monday the 2nd we had a 4 day Easter holiday here.  Many of our churches had Easter meetings from Friday night through Sunday morning so it was quiet here with most people away.  I had to stay and be on call for anesthesia.  We did 2 C/Sections, but both during the day--so I got off easy! On the 1st of April,  Dr. Chiura, my urologist from Harare, came out with 2 residents to see some patients and be here for lunch. ...