November 1

Nov 1
 This week definitely had its share of challenges. The biggest one was
the problem with the water supply. City water had been off for a
couple of days here, so eventually the four water tanks on top of the
hospital had been used up. This is not a huge problem because we have
another 20,000 liter tank out front for back-up. But, they are hooked
up to different pipe systems throughout the hospital. The problem came
we it was realized that there where no more sterile tools for surgery
and the autoclave (a machine that sterilizes instruments) is hooked up
to the tanks on top of the hospital. There where six people waiting to
have surgery, some of them desperately when Paul (the hospital
administrator) came up to Fletch and I and said, "So, we have a bit of
an interesting situation going on." From that statement we knew
something very exciting was happening. The next hour and a half was
spent hauling water in bucket from the one tank to the other. There
were about 12 of us hauling these three to four gallon buckets so that
the autoclave could be turned on.

This wasn't the end of it. That first episode was on Wednesday and by
Friday the backup tank was empty also. We now had a much more
interesting problem because there was no water to be had. The city had
now shut off our water because we had not paid our bill, because the
hospital is out of money. They would also not give us an accurate bill
until we paid yet we could not pay our bill till we had an accurate
account of what we owed. There were now two options. One was to take
50 gallon barrels and go to the stream to fill them up and the other
was to send someone to go and talk to the Chinese, who are hear paving
roads, and ask them if they could fill our tanks with there tanker
trucks.  Justin, who had just gained connections with the mayor of
Gimbie Town earlier this week, called him to see if we could have the
water from the Chinese for free. He said we could, so Justin and
Henock (an Ethiopian Accountant) set out to find the Chinese. While
this was happening, Luke, Joel, Zach and I had left for the stream to
fill the barrels of water. After we had fill them and returned to the
hospital, we set out to figure out how to transfer the water. Just
then Justin and Henock arrive in this huge tanker truck. And so the
pumping began. The truck was about 10,000 liters and was a bit over
half full. We found a big fire hose and started pumping the water into
the tank. After about a half hour, a second truck showed up, this one
was about 20,000 liters. Needless to say we got the tank full on
water. Here at Gimbie God is constantly reminding us that He is in
charge of the hospital, not us.