Saturday March 25

     This morning we went with Masmina and her brother to Benson Hospital in Paynesville, where we were shown around by Dr. and Dr. Benson who own and run the facility. I believe he is an internist and she is a pediatrician. They are clearly doing the best they can under difficult circumstances, the main problem being that not many of their clientele can afford to pay for the services they receive.
     After that we went back to JFK to do a couple of cases: a hemorrhoidectomy and another thyroid. We also lined up more cases for the remaining days of our visit here; as usual, we will be pressed to do all of the cases that people are hoping we will do, and on top of that, the endoscopy equipment has failed once again. We spent part of today trying to jury rig some arrangement that would allow us to do some of the cases, but nothing has worked out so far. We have equipment donated by the World Bank which is what we were using, but it died yesterday; we have the Fujinon processors and scopes which we used last March and September, but we can't get the light to come on; and we have some quite old Olympus equipment on which the bulbs seem to have blown. We will try again tomorrow to find a solution.
      This evening we were invited for dinner to Adelaide Gardner's house; she has entertained us before, and its always good fun. She is a lively women who once had a talk show on local radio, and a couple of years ago she had Santiago on as a guest. One of the other guests tonight was a Mrs. Cooper, and hearing her name reminded me of a situation. In 2011 I think, while we were here there was a HEARTT fundraiser dinner at City Hall which we attended, and at some point I spoke for a few minutes telling the guests how a surgeon from Connecticut came to be in Liberia on that occasion. After the dinner, a young woman approached me and said that she had gone to school in CT; when I asked where, she said it was a boarding school in Wallingford called Choate Rosemary Hall. We were both amazed when I told her that I was also a graduate of Choate! The young woman was Idela Cooper, so when I met Mrs Cooper tonight I asked her if she knew of anyone fitting that description. Almost immediately, our host Adelaide said that she knew her, and would call her right away. Not too much later, Idela Cooper came by to say hello to me !! We had a wonderful conversation, and a delightful reminder of how small the world really is.