Wednesday 12st May, 2003

Well it has been one of those weeks! I had this almost all typed in when the electricity went out and I lost it all. So here goes again--I wonder if it will seem as funny the second time around?

Two weeks ago on the 4th of May I picked up Dr. Mike Keralis from Lincoln, Nebraska. He has been a regular cast of our mission hospitals in Zimbabwe--having been at Mashoko (our sister hospital) for several visits of 6 months to 2 years and now has been coming every 2 years for 2 months. Major and I went in to pick him up and to run around and buy food for the work teams which arrive later this week. It is always like a treasure hunt to see what we might find in the store. When we went to buy some cokes there was a limit! Can you believe it? They said it was because they wanted to save them for people who came to the store to buy and got thirsty! We later found out that the price went up more than 3 times a few days later--so maybe they were holding on to their stock to make the big profit when they increased in price! A one liter coke now costs $1,000 here! (77 cents US!)

We got back to a load of work waiting for us at the hospital. We had 2 doctors here for 2 days and one was kept busy in surgery while one saw out-patients and I ran between the 2! Dr. Mbangani then left on the 8th to go to a mission hospital near Harare to learn some more surgical procedures. He is gone for 2 weeks and so it is great to have Mike here and to share the responsibility!

The country is in the worst shape ever. Fuel is non-existent because there is no foreign currency to buy it and they owe many countries alot of back debt. The only way to get fuel is on the black market at 10 to 20 times the regulated price. We have placed an order to buy 40,000 liters (10,000 gallons) with US dollars through the fuel company and it should be delivered after 21 days. Now we just have to come up with the money to buy it ($1.60 US gallon!). They will store it for us for up to 6 months and we are going in with another missionary family to help take some of it. We can store about 10,000 liters out here in the tanks and drums we have. We are also sent one of our trucks to Zambia (NW of us by about 3 1/2 hours) to try and bring in 500 liters of fuel, tomorrow, to last us until we get our delivery. We hope this works!

We have opened a new parking area at the hospital called "Scotch Park Parking Area" because more and more people are coming via Scotch cart (ox or donkey pulled carts) because the price of the buses have gone up so much since they have to buy their fuel on the black market. Some of the enterprising business people have started regular Scotch cart runs to the hospital at $100 per head from nearby townships in order to "cash in" on the situation!

Besides having no money to buy fuel the electrical company has no money to buy electricity from surrounding countries and so we have started to have some power cuts! On Thursday they called us on the radio to say ours would be off from 10-11 a.m. It was actually off from 12:20 p.m. until 6 p.m.! We were beginning to think about making sandwiches for dinner!

Then on Friday during our C/Section it went out! We had just got the baby out and boom all the lights went out! Luckily our theater (O.R.) is built on an outside wall of the hospital with high frosted windows--so there was enough light to finish and my electrical vital sign machine worked with battery back-up. We finished without suction and cautery, but Mike just went with the flow! We didn't have enough diesel to turn on our generator. We have the back up generator--but no fuel for it! We even did a Tubal Ligation later without electricity and finished our list! The electricity came back around 5 p.m. that day! So it keeps us on our toes because we never know when it might happen--like in the middle of this letter (how I lost the last copy!)

Winter is here and down to the low 60's and high 50's each morning now! It is very cool in my open dining room each morning for breakfast!

Besides the fuel and electricity problems we also have had water problems at Chidamoyo when one of our electric boreholes blew an engine because of a power surge and the diesel engine needs to be serviced and is leaking oil. We were getting water an hour a day all last week. Mike Keralis and I were having a contest to see who could get a shower in warm water in! When there was water there was no electricity to heat water and when there was electricity there was no water! So it has become a game--we are easily entertained here!

I am in Harare today because I am here to pick up the first of our work teams on Friday morning--by Sunday we will have 13 new American visitors at Chidamoyo! With no fuel, no electricity and no water it should be a great introduction into bush life! At least they should be happy to be out of the US where I hear the security rating is back up to orange again because of renewed terrorist attacks. We are at black level here--no one in their right mind wants to do anything in this country--we are already a disaster!

Yesterday morning I arrived at work to find a psych patient handcuffed to a hospital bed and pulling the bed behind him along the veranda. I just started laughing! Definitely not JACHO approved!

My car is in the shop for a service all day so spent the morning walking around and finally took a taxi home to spend time catching up on my 113 E-mails that were waiting for me when I got to town last night! Have lots to run around and do tomorrow! Buying a new borehole engine is one of the things!

I started off the day at Meikles hotel with breakfast after dropping the car off. Breakfast is now $10,000! Bet you have never spent that for breakfast before! Ha! That's now $5US!

thanks to all of you for your prayers and thoughts. We really need them--it keeps us going!

Love, Kathy