What a day! On Friday Bram welcomed three international visitors from different organisations to Arrow Web Hospital.
Paul from Tour d'Afrique, Toronto Canada
As you know, Paul McManus from Tour d'Afrique had hoped to be able to visit us this week, after he and his colleagues had given us the very generous gift of twenty five bikes, at a local ceremony in Nairobi on Sunday.
Paul was very keen to see for himself the difference these bikes make to the work of our Community Outreach Team members, who rely on them to reach even further into the slums. One of the main roles of our Community Outreach Team is to let people know about the services we offer at the hospital, particularly to encourage expectant mothers to come to the antenatal clinics regularly, have their babies delivered here and then bring their babies to our immunisation clinics. http://www.tourdafrique.com/
John from COCO, Newcastle UK
John, a new member of COCO's team based in Newcastle in the UK visited us too, for the first time. You may remember that Lucy now a director at COCO, and her colleague Kat came to see us last May. As a result, COCO decided to support some of our work with children. COCO has also already pledged over £3000 or 400,000 Ksh to help transport the container of essential medical equipment and suppplies from the UK to Mombasa.
John was particularly interested to hear about our Comprehensive Care Project, targeted at some of our poorest children and orphans. This project ensures there is enough annual funding for the treatment of these children at Arrow Web Hospital, and for the childhood immunisations they need. This year we aim to double the number of children we help in this way to two hundred. These children are the most vulnerable in our community to diseases and illness, many of which are life threatening.
We also discussed with John our plans to set up a system of solar panels, which would give us a continuous electricity supply. At the moment we have great problems when the supply breaks down and equipment fails us. http://www.coco.org.uk/
Jacq from Moray Community Health and Social Care Partnership, Moray UK
Friday was Jacq's first opportunity to see Arrow Web Hospital for herself, having arrived from the UK on Thursday night. Of course she had heard all about us from her colleagues Jamie and Liz from NHS Grampian, who visited us last September. She brought with her a laptop, camera and video camera which had been donated by some of our friends in the UK. She also brought a huge bag of essential medical supplies which Dr Ishmael Onyango, our senior doctor was really pleased with.
Jacq is a self funding volunteer who will be working with us for two weeks. She will be looking at ways of recording all our activity electronically and helping Bram set up electronic systems to make managing our finances easier and more efficient. She hopes to go out into the community with Rachel our Community Outreach Team leader, to find out more about the team's work. This will help with fundraising and in planning for the future. MHSCP link: http://tinyurl.com/4nfnotm
We look forward to hearing more about Jacq's visit and hopefully there will be plenty photos Bram!
We are always so pleased to welcome visitors to Arrow Web Hospital and to know that friends all over the world support us. If you would like to hear more about the work we do or would like to arrange a visit, please contact us at http://www.arrowkenya.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment