Hospital of Hope volunteers, from left, Norman Carr, Dick Long and Homer
Smuck load up a four-by-four foot crate full of medical supplies being
shipped to Burundi, Africa. The supplies will be shipped out Friday.
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FRIENDS OF KIBIMBA HOSPITAL Friends of Kibimba Hospital is partnering with the Evangelical Friends church of Burundi to restore the hospital at Kibimba. Our desire is to make available both medical and spiritual healing for the community by improving staffing, facilities and equipment at the hospital. We will channel funds and short-term workers to help, with the ultimate goal of self-sufficiency. For more information, including contact information, please click on the following link: Kibimba Hospital Brochure The container being sent to the hospital was in the news! Below is the article that was published in the Wichita Eagle on 4-4-08 along with some pictures of the Friends of Kibimba Hospital helping to pack the crates. Sending hope to African hospitalBY KAREN SHIDELERThe Wichita Eagle
Hospital of Hope volunteers, from left, Norman Carr, Dick Long and Homer
Smuck load up a four-by-four foot crate full of medical supplies being
shipped to Burundi, Africa. The supplies will be shipped out Friday.
The sutures, syringes and surgical solution have been separated and logged. Bed sheets and boxes of blood-collection needles share space with an ultrasound machine in a big wooden crate. And, next week, a 40-foot container packed with 30 tons of these medical supplies will leave Wichita, bound for the central African republic of Burundi, one of the poorest countries in the world. They'll be used to outfit Kibimba Hospital, where one of Burundi's six trained surgeons and his staff treat more than 13,000 patients a year. The shipment is the work of two Wichita organizations: Hospitals of Hope and Friends of Kibimba Hospital. The latter group came together as Wichitans such as Dick Long and Kevin Hoppock made mission trips to Burundi. Hoppock, a physician, visited the hospital in 2000 while doing medical missionary work. Long is a retired Coleman engineer who has made three trips to the hospital, part of a mission station. Long, one of the project coordinators, and other volunteers sorted and packed supplies earlier this week in the Hospitals of Hope warehouse in north Wichita. Hospitals of Hope is a nonprofit organization founded by Mike Wawrzewski, a physician assistant, in 1998. It sends donated and purchased medical supplies to places in need all over the world. "Everything we're putting in here is what you'd need to open a hospital," Wawrzewski said, as wooden crates were packed and nailed shut. Among the supplies: hospital beds, an anesthesia machine, maternity beds, lights for operating rooms, IVs, gowns, blankets and catheters. Nearly all of the supplies were donated by Hospitals of Hope. "What's this?" a volunteer asked as the supplies were sorted and logged, for customs purposes. "More tubing. No, it's glide wire. Do you know what glide wire is?" The answer didn't matter: Into a box it went. Long said Friends of Kibimba Hospital agreed several years ago to support surgeon Nahiman Elisee, who was born at the hospital and returned years later after training. They pay his full-time salary: $1,000 a month. Long's group sent Elisee a sterilizer, donated by Hospitals of Hope, about 2 ½ years ago and has supplied about 500 layette sets for new mothers. That's enough for about three months. The medical supplies will travel to Houston, then to Dar Es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania. From there, the supplies will go overland to neighboring Burundi. The trip will take about two months. The container leaving next week is the first of at least four that will go overseas before the summer is out. Wawrzewski said shipments are scheduled to Uganda, Iraq and Bolivia, with another possibly going to Honduras.
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