What in the World is Timo doing....

This is a question that I've been asked quite a bit. Before leaving, during my trip to Goma, and even while I've been here. So, I thought I would give a list of the things that I've started working on during my 3 weeks here and which I will plan to expand on when I return in April.

New Clinic:
There is a new clinic that is being built at the Hospital and I've started discussing the project with the construction forman here in Goma, the architect in Sacramento, and Dick Anderson one of the directors on the US side of HEAL Africa. I'll be doing the interface between the architect in Sacramento and the people doing the work here, as well as working with the forman when trouble shooting is needed and with the actual location and construction of the clinic. Plans should be here by the 3rd of March and by the time I get back in April I think the preparation for the foundation should be completed.

Waste disposal:
Right now the hospital has a small incinerator that they use to burn all of the waste that comes out of the hospital. This includes needles, rubber gloves, bandages, biological waste, etc. You name it, coming out of the hospital, and they are burning it. This is obviously not the best practice for a hospital, although it is common practice in nearly all hospitals here from what I understand. So, I've got 2 projects that I'd like to tackle. One is designing a waste disposal program for the various medical departments at the hospital with separate containers for different classes of waste and implementation/training of the doctors, nurses, and lab technicians working in the hospital.
The second project is a redesign of the incinerator. It's basically a small open air fire place that's sitting in the far corner of the property. I'm taking a wild guess and saying that they smoke coming out of the 10' tall smoke stack is pretty toxic, and if the wind is blowing the wrong way it heads straight at the technical services buildings and towards the ward where women recovering from VVF surgery are staying. (although the smoke is pretty thinned out by that point)

Water Supply:
It's a novel idea to have a reliable supply of running water at a hospital.... Unfortunately they don't here. There are a couple of water tanks that are supposed to be a back up for when the city water stops working, which happens from time to time and can last a week or more, but I'm not convinced that they are filling up, or that they can really be helpful during a prolong water shortage because of the small pipe size leading to and from the tank. So, there are a couple of ideas I'm working on for fixing this situation. The first of which is to design a way to measure how much water is in the tank, which would be a good thing to know for starters. This will be a longer term project because ultimately we need to design a system of water storage and distribution that could supply the hospital for up to a week if the city water supply cuts out.

Nutrition project:
Global Strategies is planning to start a small manufacturing process for a generic version of "Plumpy Nut" which is basically a fortified peanut butter. The "Plumpy Nut" will be distributed to malnurished children who have HIV and are on ARV treatment. It will also be sold to local NGO's to make the program self sustainable. At this point we have been visiting local vendors to find out where and how we can get the ingredients and equipment and how much it will cost, as well as where it will be located. The people doing the work will be caretakers of Orphans here in Goma so we're not just providing much needed food to kids, but also much needed jobs and income for these caretakers.

English Lessons:
We are starting english conversation classes twice a week for several of the doctors and hope to expand it to include any of the staff who are interested in improving their english. For the two doctors that we are focusing on at first it is critical for them to improve their english as they are slated to attend a training course in Israel.
There is also a translator at the hospital who teaches ESL to some of the students from a local university and I've started helping him with those classes once a week. While I'm back in the US during March I will be getting some better reference materials for both of these classes.

So, those are the things that are keeping me busy at the moment and will be my focus when I return for 3 months from April to July. "Now you know...... and knowing is half the battle..."

(sorry- no pictures at this point because my internet connection is way to slow. I'll try to update with photo's when I get back to the states.)