Saturday March 12

      Telecommunications is a bigger problem this visit than it has been in the past. For reasons that remain unclear to me, I am not able to access the Internet except through Wifi. In the past, we have been able to use Wifi, and when that wasn't available, we could use cellular data access. Anyway, the only Wifi access we have is at the JFK Administration building or at our hotel; the result is that while I have been good about writing my blog, i haven't always remembered to post it when I could. My apologies.
       We did a lot of surgery today, mostly hernias large and small. Having advertised that our services were available, and then admitted many patients who wished to take advantage of them, we were under a certain amount of pressure to clear out the patients who are waiting for surgery. We ended up doing 6 cases, all hernias large and small...Oh one was a hydrocele.
       Between cases we saw some other patients that we had heard about. One is a 3 year old girl with a large umbilical hernia that will obviously not close on its own. She was in the hospital recently to have it repaired, but her mother grew frustrated and scared and took her home. Somehow Aunt Jenny knew about her, and asked if I would fix it if she could get the girl and her mother back; of course I agreed. It turns out that during the war, the mother was separated from her 2 children, and they were thought to be orphans; they ended up being adopted to the US and she has never heard from them again. She is desperately afraid of losing this little girl. Auntie Jenny brought her to the hospital today, and with encouragement and the promise that I would do her surgery tomorrow, she was admitted.
       We also saw a little boy with what looks to me like a retinoblastoma ( malignant tumor of the eye). I was shown a picture of him the other night at Aunt Jennie's when the eye was all swollen and inflamed after his mother took him to a native healer who blew some magic powder into the eye. Now that the inflammation has settled down, the tumor is obvious, but there is no one in Liberia who can take care of this problem. They need to take him to Ghana, but that is expensive; I'm not sure what will happen.
      After we finished surgery, Moses took us to the mask shops at Mamba Point where we looked around and bought a few things. Santiago bought a couple of gorgeous, but huge, masks; getting them back to the US is going to be something of a trick I think. I bought some smaller items, including another Command Stick; I'm not sure why I need such a thing, but it's good to have !
      After dinner at FuzionAfrica, we came back to the hotel and I crashed.