April 2009

Since January we have not been able to take Zim dollars for our hospital fees since there is nowhere in the whole country that will take them. You can only buy in US and Rand everywhere. So we have decided people can barter for their fees. An X-ray is 6 chickens or 1 goat. You can pay 10 kg of peanuts for consultation fee. We get bags of peanuts, ground nuts,maize, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins. Squash, eggs, cowpeas, sunflower seeds, soap and even a brake light! This helps us feed our patients! We now have over 300 chickens and 100 goats! We have a room full of peanuts and have 2 people full time shelling them by hand. We recently bought a peanut butter machine and are making our own peanut butter to put in the porridge in the
morning. We keep joking everyday that we are collecting more than the GMB(Grain Marketing Board).

Our Friday night movies have grown with over 300 people coming to watch . People really look forward to it. We now have battery backup and so we can do it without electricity, which is never on for Friday nights it seems.

The hospital work is busy. Most hospitals are back working now but they have little meds and equipment and so people come here. I am swamped with all the paperwork and seeing all TB and AIDS patients! Most days I can't get home before 6 or 7 p.m. and then bring some of the paperwork home. In February the government gave each health worker $100US
and in March paid us more US for Jan and Feb which came to $500 US for my position. They keep paying us in Zim in our bank accounts but no one can spend it.

Cholera seemed to end 2 months after it started and we closed our cholera ward on 21 Feb. We continued to have a few patients here and there but none in the past 3 weeks so we are very happy! We had the best record in the whole country with 721 cases treated and only 1 death! Thanks for your prayers and thoughts and extra food to cope with this tragedy!

We hired a second doctor in January, Dr. Vernon Murenje and he joined our work and so it has been busy trying to keep up with 2 doctors. Hopefully, eventually we will be able to get into a routine and I might get some weekends off to catch up on correspondence. It hasn't slowed down enough yet to do that, but I am working on that!

We now have 543 patients on treatment for AIDS and 6 outreach clinics for ART (drugs we treat AIDS with). Even though we are supposed to be getting money from Global AIDS fund to treat our patients the money has not been released to Zimbabwe because of some problems of misuse of money. We pray it might come soon.

We have been having pretty reliable electricity- never more than 20 hours a day, until this week and now we have been off for 10 days straight. We hope they can figure out the problem soon! PTL for battery backup. We are running the generator 4 hours a day to keep everything charged and to do X-rays.

Now that everything is in US or Rand here we have much more available in the stores and companies. Everything is much more expensive than in the US or UK so we can't always afford a lot. We are so thankful to many of you that have helped us with money for food and running the hospital. We were recently recognized by the government for our excellent care and work.

Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers. We couldn't be here without you!