Preparation

    In preparation for this (March2017) trip, we have sent a huge amount of supplies ahead. Thru Masmina Sirleaf, the wonderful Executive Director of HEARTT who lives in Monrovia, we were notified that a container would be filled in Philadelphia for shipment to Liberia and JFK. Seizing this as an opportunity to clear out a lot of the donated material I had stored in my basement, I went to UHaul to buy 18" X18" X 24" boxes and filled 23 of them for a total of 900lbs of various medical supplies. Similarly, Santiago emptied a room of supplies at his office in Indiana into 24 boxes; also included in his boxes are 3 colonoscopes and a processor kindly donated by Fuji. His boxes and my boxes were trucked to Philadelphia where they were loaded into the container.
    The good news is that the 47 boxes made it to Philadelphia and the ship sailed. The bad news heard yesterday from Masmina is that our container is currently in Spain being held up by a dock strike or something. We were hoping that the shipment would arrive in Liberia before or during our visit, but that is starting to look unlikely. Fortunately we planned to bring many other supplies with us on the plane, so our work won't suffer too much if the container doesn't arrive in time.
     Our surgical team for this trip includes Dr. Aaron Gilson, a senior surgical resident at Waterbury Hospital; Dr. Philomina Thuruthumaly, an anesthesiologist from Indiana who returns after coming on our March 2014 trip; Samantha Shoultz, a surgical (Scrub) tech from Indiana; and my friend, colleague, and every March trip companion Dr. Santiago Arruffat.
     The wonderful people at JFK Hospital get better organized each time for our visit. Mrs. Cooper, who runs the Admitting Office, sent me a list of possible surgery candidates last week; I was able to review them and prioritize them so that we can make the most effective use of our time. From the list I can see that we will have a number of very interesting surgical cases, and that doesn't include the large number of patients who will show up during the course of our visit.
     Several years ago Dr. Arruffat, Dr.Jonathan Laryea, and I set up a charitable foundation called Support JFK Inc to provide funding support for this work. We would not be able to do what we do without the contributions to Support JFK by our generous donors including Mr. and Mrs. Peter Knight, Mr. Samuel Francis thru Dr. Arruffat, and the Barbara and Marty Zweig Foundation. Thank you !!