Saturday March 7 and Sunday March 8

     On Saturday we worked in the morning doing a variety of cases. One of them was a young girl with a fun gating tumor on her thigh. Apparently excision had been attempted elsewhere twice, but it had come back again. It was sent to us as "malignant melanoma", but I think that diagnosis is quite unlikely. I removed it with a decent margin, so we shall see what the pathologist says.
     We finished 6 cases by 3pm; as we were preparing to leave for the day, I asked Ama if we would need to scale back our operating plans for next week because of a shortage of supplies. She rather emphatically said yes, and explained that there were more shortages than I had thought. We shall see.
     Saturday evening Teresa Cummings invited us to join her for dinner. Originally we were going to go to Mamba Point, but all day there have been a lot of people in the streets because the governing party(CDC) is having a gathering this weekend. So we switched and decided to dine on the roof of the Royal instead. It was a very pleasant gathering and a lot of fun!
     Sunday we were up early to leave the hotel at 8 am for a drive to the Farmington Hotel near the airport where we attended the launch of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development. It was planned to coincide with International Women's Day!  There were 200-300 people there, including the current President George Weah, the current Vice President Jewel Taylor, and a variety of retired Presidents and others from neighboring countries. There were a lot of speeches, some of which were quite interesting. Madame President has already started a program called Amujae, which is a Liberian dialect word for "We're moving up". 15 or so young women from all over Africa have been selected to come to Monrovia 4 times during the next year to attend an intense 3 day course of education, coaching, and mentoring by Madame and several of her friends. The first Amujae class was there, and included a number of impressive young women including the first female minister of Finance from Ghana, the first female Mayor of Freetown Sierra Leone, and others of similar accomplishment. Over the next couple of years the physical Center will be built, and will contain a library, an exhibition area to display her achievements, and a conference center.
      I had a nice conversation with Madame President in which we talked about her travel plans including a likely trip to Dublin once the corona virus scare has abated. Seated next to her was Linda Thomas-Greenfield, former US Ambassador to Liberia and then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Obama administration. She introduced herself and we had a pleasant chat.
     Then back to the hotel where we rested, had dinner, and crashed for the night.