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September 17: Each day here I hear more reports and personal stories of damage from the flood. Yesterday I talked to a Burkinabe doctor who said the central hospital has been shut down and the government is seriously considering completely rebuilding it. All the big expensive medical machines were damaged by the water and have been declared "irreparable" by technicians. A second hospital, run by a protestant mission, was also flooded, but they have been able to bring their medical equipment back online. (In fact, the medical technologist who is repairing their machines is now affiliated with ChildAlive.) All the different departments of the government hospital have been moved to different parts of the city now, adding to the confusion in finding the proper care for different health problems. One of the deeper, more long-lasting effects of this flood comes from the loss of the hospital archives. Years and years of medical records and research have been lost now. Medical students in Ouagadougou have had to completely change their research and thesis plans, now that the data they were depending on has been lost. Most will have to start again from scratch, develop a new plan of research, and find new sources of information. In August, ChildAlive, the organization started by Dr. Ian Macdonald to help combat diseases affecting children in Burkina Faso, agreed to cooperate with Drs Peter Vandingenen and Jacob Sawadogo in a new project aimed at bringing healthcare to children in poor neighborhoods of the city of Ouagadougou, called Paam Laafi ("get healthy"). Peter and Jacob went out to the flood refugee sites this week to talk with government officials about the medical needs of the thousands of people displaced and living temporarily in schools and churches. Today, they started treating some special cases that could not be handled by the medical facilities set up at the sites by the government and the Red Cross. I hope to go with them tomorrow to take photos and report on their work. By the way, Peter and Jacob's colleague, Marc de Vries, is the medical technician who is repairing and reanimating the medical equipment at the protestant hospital in town. He also hopes to be given a look at the equipment at the government hospital to see if he can revive them as well. Right now, the only operating CT scan machine in the city was repaired by Marc! Check out the Photo Gallery for more photos from the refugee site, taken on September 15. On Tuesday, September 1, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso received between 12 and 18 inches of rain in a period of 12 hours. One reliable, but unofficial, source measured 400 mm (over 18 inches), but the official amount is around 12 inches. This cause massive flooding throughout the city, and many outlying neighborhoods, where the poor build simple houses of mud brick, were devastated. The BBC reported more than 150,000 people displaced by the flooding. According to reports from personal friends and colleagues, the rain began in the early morning, while it was still dark, but the most concentrated downpour occurred between 6 and 8 am while many people were trying to get to work or school. The normal water evacuation canals and sewers were overwhelmed by the huge quantity of water that fell that morning, washing away several bridges and making even the largest and most important roads of the city almost impassible for a time. The greatest tragedy occurred in the un-zoned neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, where people build temporary houses of mud-brick, hoping to eventually get squatters rights to the land before building out of concrete. These are the neighborhoods of the urban poor, the people who scrape out a living on about $1 a day. Most of the employees of SIL, the organization we work with in Burkina, lived in these parts of town and lost their houses and many of the things inside. SIL has set up a relief fund to help these employees rebuild their houses and start their lives again. People can donate to this relief fund by writing checks to Good Hope Presbyterian Church with the designation "Burkina Flood Relief", and mailing them to the following address: Rev. Jack Waller Stuart will be traveling to Ouagadougou on September 13 and will transfer the money to the SIL relief fund after he arrives. Here is a field report from the director of the SIM mission in Ouagadougou (note: SIM is not the same organization as SIL and Wycliffe, the two orgs Cathie and Stuart work for) Here is another personal report from a Canadian friend married to a Burkinabe. |