Hello Friends/Family/Sponsors and fellow Supporters,
We apologise for the delay of this blog. As you can imagine things have been pretty busy since we hit UK ground. Hannah’s Parents have kindly allowed us to live with them whilst we get back on our feet. The day we arrived home we had both applied for jobs as being financially stable with a baby on the way is a must. Andy was initially working for South Central Ambulance as a Call Handler until starting back in the Police after his career break, which he is cutting short from the intended 3 year period. We have recently moved to Tadley, Hampshire to accommodate Andy's new job with Thames Valley Police. Hannah is working at present as a Paediatric Staff Nurse on Northbrook Ward (as Bank Staff) in Winchester and has also been successful in her application to join a Nursing Agency. She is just waiting for final clearance.
We are relieved after two months of being back in the UK to have work and the prospect of stability for our immediate family in the New Year. Our little baby is now in the 32nd week of development and we can proudly announce.... we are having a little girl! We were very apprehensive when we first arrived home and had the 20 week scan, as the sonographer and Consultant thought our baby may have a condition called hydrocephalus (fluid on the brain, affecting brain development). We had to wait three weeks to find out for sure and it was the worst wait of our lives. Thanks to those of you who knew and were praying – we can with absolute relief and joy tell you that this concern is no more and she is a perfectly healthy little lady, who appears to be completely unaffected by the malaria, serious urinary tract infection and food poisoning Hannah went through in the first trimester of pregnancy….she is clearly oblivious to all of the recent stresses we have gone through too. Aren’t babies amazing!
We are sorry that our last blog was brief, but as we were in Nairobi at the time, we were limited in what we could share. We have waited until now to update you, because we wanted time to heal and pray through our experience there so we could write in an objective way and with better accuracy.
Just so you know our commitment to Africa as a continent has not been dampened by what we encountered in Nairobi, but our financial involvement with the Nairobi project will now cease and we would advise that any independent supporters of this work do the same. We also want you to know we did not come home early because of the baby; we were committed to stay until Hannah was 34 weeks pregnant with the prospect of returning to Nairobi 6 months after baby is born.
What we have to share is difficult and yet we hope that people who were waiting to hear if Lina Medical Health Services could become a sustainable project in future after previous involvement with St. Thomas’ Handshake to the Kware Slum will find some closure.
Our time in East Africa was amazing and challenging and it revealed to us that God may call you to a cause, and our job is to be obedient. What happens after you take those steps in faith is God’s journey not ours. What we thought we would be doing was different to what God clearly wanted us to do.
Our time in Burundi with Burundi Youth for Christ (YFC) working at Shammah was truly special and we will carry those memories forever. Regarding the Team at Shammah Health Center – we have made some friends for life. It would be unfair to depict that our Burundi experience was perfect – we had times of great personal struggle, illness, spiritual attack and strained relationships at times but we see now that God was just making us strong enough for what we had to do in Nairobi. Burundi YFC has been going through some difficulties in this last few months regarding the way it is run and the support of its volunteers, but it is with full confidence we can tell you that Simon Guillebaud has stepped in at the perfect time to address these issues and ensure that future of Burundi YFC is a great one, and we have no doubt it will be!
We would also like to share with you that our colleagues Josh and Nadine Guenther (from Canada) the Directors of Shammah Health Center are stepping down as directors of Shammah and handing over leadership to the Burundians which had always been the intention. They will however continue to be a blessing to the people of East Africa by working in Uganda with an organization called LifeNet.
Canada has been one of Shammah’s largest sources of funds via Josh & Nadine over the past two years, but as they are now leaving this funding is likely to decline somewhat, so it is important that Shammah continues to be well funded. As you heard in our previous blogs the care and dedication delivered at this Health Center is excellent even by Western Standards and affordable for the local people. Before we tell you about Nairobi we want you to know we plan to stay linked to Shammah Health Center and would encourage you to do the same.
As always Shammah Health Center is in great need of your prayers and support, and the clinic is now run 100% by Africans so please pray for their continued wisdom and high standards. We intend to visit the work again in the future but in the meantime plan to build a support network for Shammah Health Center in the UK. In the future we would love to lead a group visit to Burundi, and would love for as many of you as possible to be a part of this. Burundi is such a beautiful but needy country, and we both feel that short term mission is such a positive in bringing a taste of the work back home to secure funds and supporters. Please let us know if that may interest you!
Okay now you have the positives of Burundi to hold onto, let us explain why we had to leave Nairobi and cease involvement with the work:
When we arrived, we were excited to get stuck in with the work at Lina Medical Health Services. However, our first day at the clinic proved to open the door to a story that appears to have been built on omissions of information and deceit, where the health care offered at this clinic is not among the best of Nairobi but possibly the worst. When we chose to become involved in the work, we were aware that Lina Medical Health Services was failing as a business, but we had been led to believe they just needed help to advertise their services because the health care was excellent. This is why they had said an Ambulance would be helpful – expanding their services and advertising their name. However, the financialdeficit of the clinic is much worse than we had been told. They are in at least £10,000 debt and continue to add to this deficit by approx.. £1500 every month.
If we had been told this, we could have come up with a different fundraising strategy. Hellen admits to her staff being ‘sub-standard’ and says that she has accepted this is partly due to the deficit. We were told it is illegal to have a pharmacist who is not qualified, yet Lina operates with an illegal pharmacist. The cleanliness of the clinic is very poor, dirt everywhere with a dirty handkerchief and IV caps all of the floor of the hospitalisation room that consists of two beds, each barely covered by a single sheet with stains on it. This room in particular looked as though it had not been cleaned for months. When asked, Hellen said they have no proper cleaning equipment and no spare bed linen yet they have been open for two years!!!
Medical equipment that had been previously sent from the UK was either thrown in dirty cupboards or in a shed where everything had been covered by a thick layer of dirt and dust. They said they had an inventory of all equipment but when we showed them the equipment in the cupboards they did not realise it was there. This takes us back to the first day at the clinic, when a neck brace we had found would have been helpful.
On the morning of our first day, we had just been shown around Lina Medical Health Services and had sat down in Hellen’s Office to discuss a plan of action over the next five months. A phone call came in saying they had an emergency patient. Hellen ran to their Emergency room and we followed. We wanted to observe the excellent health care Hellen had told us about in preparation for the arrival of the Ambulance, so initially observed. To start with there were too many people in the room, two being a pharmacist and a dentist. The patient lay slumped on the bed, unconscious with a bleeding head injury after falling from a flat three stories high. His head was slumped. Instead of checking and stabilizing his airway, checking properly for breathing and a pulse. Hellen led the emergency situation – asking for an IV cannula to be inserted and fluids commenced, a neat injection of 50% Glucose to be given and a suture kit so she could suture the patient’s head. It was evident that the patient was dead on arrival and yet they continued with these other procedures. We both questioned Hellen on several occasions about whether the patient was breathing, she said he was, it was just shallow and she insisted the same about his pulse. After 15 minutes we stepped in Hannah assessed the patient was not breathing and did not have a pulse. Andy checked the patient’s airway – his tongue was in his throat and when Andy checked his eyes were fixed and pupils dilated (confirming the patient was brain dead). The patient had been dead the whole time and their best attempt at resuscitation had been a light press of the hand on his chest. Hannah declared the patient was dead at 20 minutes and told them it was unacceptable that they had not assessed Airway, Breathing and Circulation prior to doing anything else – the absolute basics. Andy saw that the nurse had documented what Hannah had said regarding what they should have done on the patient’s notes, to imply that these steps had been followed. When we told Hellen she did not seem to understand the problem with this dishonesty saying that we had discussed it. We explained you cannot write you have done something when you have not. Hannah asked why 50% Glucose was administered, no answer was given and when Hellen was asked why she said the patient was breathing and had a pulse when they did not, she said because she did not want to believe they were dead.
It was truly horrifying to watch and to see that their emergency equipment was in a wardrobe or Halfords tool box, so not easily accessible. Most of their emergency drugs were out of date by 8 months. We explained to Hellen that it was a blessing the patient had been dead upon arrival because there is nothing they could have done to help him, but they needed to learn from this for the future.
In an aim to improve basics, we ran a teaching session on Basic Life Support, using all the emergency equipment and teaching on the importance of cleanliness and infection control. Despite doing this we found a lack of willingness to change without us doing things for them. We refurbished three of the four clinic rooms and got the fourth painted in the short time we were there. This included the procedure room which we painted cream, a far more professional colour than fuchsia pink!
The dentist was removed from the clinic because none of his equipment was sterile and his dentist chair had a ‘spit bowl’ that was stained brown and smelt of faecal matter. His service was bringing in so few clients, so was not of benefit and his presence was preventing efficient use of space. We moved the Doctor upstairs into the Dentist’s room, so that the emergency room downstairs was better equipped for emergencies. When we were doing this we asked the Nurse to tell us if a patient came in so we could prepare the room. She ignored this and post consultation took the patient up to the procedure room, which was still drying and stunk of paint, with dustsheets everywhere, got the patient up on the coach and removed a contraceptive coil wearing non-sterile gloves. Hannah challenged this with Hellen and her only answer was lack of money and yet she refuses to close until they have a proper business plan.
With the Ambulance on its way, and fundraised specifically for Lina, we had to be good stewards and make sure it arrived, which it has, but they do not have the money to insure the vehicle despite telling us they would and being giving extra money for this purpose, which went on a bribe to the Kenyan Finance Minister for tax exemption to be given. The exemption was not given.
In addition to this it appears that Hellen’s brothers are using Lina Medical Health Services as a site to run their filming business (using office space, electricity, computers, etc) and still taking a wage every month from Lina despite not appearing to do anything to help Lina. When Hannah challenged Andrew, one of the two brothers, he handed his resignation in, which is a blessing, but also quite telling.
It was heartbreaking to realise Hellen and the other staff had not prepared for us coming. The visit her daughter Jassy made to Burundi to learn from Shammah was a wasted experience, because although she had been making notes, nothing had actually been implemented, even in basics like cleaning! It became clear that there was an expectation that we were coming with a huge money pot to buy Lina out of debt and refurbish it to the standard of other clinics in Nairobi (which are now almost western standard and some equal to UK private clinics) without any true investment from the Kenyan staff. The problem is, that even if we did do this there is not a demand for their service in the area due to many other clinics. On average they get 3-4 patients a day and these patients are not even received in a very professional or welcoming manner. This would mean getting donors to pour money into a project which is likely to haemhorrage this out over time, which was not something, in good conscience, that we could do.
We had to be blunt and say that they will have to use land and assets they have from when the work was St. Thomas’ Handshake to the Kware Slum to invest in the project and make it sustainable and that they would have to contract the Ambulance out to other companies to generate some income. There is no way with a failing business that they can fund charity work into the nearby slum (Tassia Slum). We cried everyday we were there – it was the lies and deceit that hurt us the most. We felt that by having been mislead by a friend of 23 years we had misled others. This is not to say that during the previous work with Handshake to Kware that this was the case.
We realise now that for over 23 years in total, in one capacity or another Hellen and her family have been given enough financial support from the West to invest in something themselves and sadly if they are not going to do it now they never will.
Hellen was not even working full days when we were in Nairobi – she would often walk in at 11am and leave halfway through the day, returning hours later. We explained if she is the Managing Director she must lead by example.
Having to leave so unexpectedly was very unsettling – we had spent all the personal money we had on refurbishing the clinic and just have to hope the advice given, along with the teaching and the arrival of the Ambulance will be enough to motivate Hellen and the Lina Team to push forward. Hellen said we have woken her from her slumber and our prayer is that this is true.
We are sorry to have returned with such sad news – nobody believed there was a future for Lina Medical Health Services more than us, and hopefully the Ambulance can make this possible. Regarding the UK support, we believe it is time to step out and at least people can now know they will not spend years wondering if their finances were being used honestly.
We would ask that you please do not circulate this blog to others not on this mailing list, as it is of a sensitive nature and is also very personal to us. We are soooo grateful for all of your support and belief in us. We would ask now that you pray for Shammah and consider future involvement with work, whether financially or through prayer. Pray for Lina that it will be a success or if this is not God’s will that Hellen will have discernment to stop the work and finally for us that we integrate back into UK life and get financially stable by 14th March when our baby is due. We’d also ask that having read this, you don’t ask any further questions to us personally as we are trying to rebuild ourselves in the UK, and need to move on from the experience we had in Nairobi.
May God Bless you abundantly and thank you again for your patience in waiting for answers, as to why we returned earlier than planned.
Love Andy and Hannah x
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| Storage cupboard in old dentist's room |
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| Dentists chair |
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| Neck collars! |
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| Dentist's room |
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| Obs/treatment room |
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| Obs/Treatment room |
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| Procedure/family planning room |
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| Old doctors consultation room (now Emergency room) |
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| Under bed in Obs room |
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| Newly painted obs room |
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| Emergency room (old consultation room) |
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| New consultation room |
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| New consultation room |
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| New use for cupboard! |
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| Emergency cabinet |
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| Equipment trolley |
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| Obs room |
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| New UK equipment in obs room |
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