Vancouver, Canada – A Vancouver charity, headed by a local nurse, is shipping an ambulance to Liberia, a country in desperate need of such crucial medical services and supplies.
Liberia’s chief medical officer was born under a tree on a rural rice farm in 1965 because his pregnant mother had no way to get to the medical clinic in nearby Karlokeh.
So it seemed like a personal gift on Friday when a Vancouver charity gave him a used ambulance which will be shipped to Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, to start the county’s Emergency Medical Service — one that will help patients, like his mother, get to a hospital.
“In many instances, even in Monrovia, we have seen women delivering right in the middle of the road,” said Dr. Francis Kateh, who is also Liberia’s deputy minister of health.
“This is why (I’m) so passionate, it is just something I hold dear to, because I see this happening every day to young women… And because of the delays, fatalities occur.”
The mastermind of the project is Vancouver General Hospital nurse Marj Ratel, who founded Korle Bu, a charity that collects medical items considered surplus by B.C. hospitals, care homes and doctors’ offices — including furniture, pharmaceuticals, linens and equipment — and raises money to ship them to West African countries with bare-bones health care systems. Eleven shipping containers have been sent to Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone in the past couple of years.
When Ratel told one of her biggest volunteers — Rick Diamond, owner of Diamond Delivery — that Liberia, a country of little close to five million people, was desperate for ambulances, he immediately offered to fund the purchase of this one.
The $25,000 ambulance has been refurbished and now bears the Liberian flag and other important decals such as 4455 — the phone number that Liberia uses for emergency calls, instead of 911. It will be shipped to Liberia along with many other supplies the nation needs, thanks to the financial and organizational efforts of Ratel’s Vancouver-based Korle-Bu Neuroscience Foundation, Diamond Delivery of Surrey, and the Kamloops Firefighters Charitable Society.
Right now in Liberia, there are ambulances that will transfer patients from one medical facility to another, and there are very basic vehicles that will help patients in rural areas, but there is no service like 911. So, car accident victims or people with bad spinal injuries or pregnant women typically have to find their own way to the hospital.
Ratel, who frequently visits West Africa for her charitable work, said that right now in Liberia, injured people are often put in the back of a truck — without spinal boards or any other medical gear — to be taken to a hospital. “We had a young man fell off his bike. He got up and said, ‘Oh my neck is hurting.’ They put him in a truck, drove him over a bumpy road, and by the time he got to the hospital he was paraplegic,” she said in a recent interview.
On Friday, Kamloops fire captain David Sakaki gave Kateh a tour of the rig, which is kitted out with medical gear and can hold one stretcher and up to seven other people in seats.
“I can’t wait to see this in Liberia,” a grateful Kateh told him.
Sakaki and other Kamloops firefighters, through their charitable foundation, have sent four ambulances and 16 fire trucks to Nicaragua in the past, and this is their first for Liberia.
Sakaki drove the rig from Quebec, where it was purchased, back to B.C., and helped get it ready to be sent to Monrovia.
He said the charitable work is rewarding because they know they are helping “people at their time of greatest need.”
The ambulance is expected to arrive in Liberia in November.
Source: The Providence
