Stacia Neale, Fundraising Operations for HealthyKids International (HKI), is blogging on her experiences as she accompanies the SickKids No Boundaries team to Ethiopia to oversee the filming of a documentary. Read all her posts here.
Note: Due to insurmountable internet problems, I was unable to post the rest of my entries while still in Ethiopia.
Tuesday was our first official day of surgery. Although it was Timkat, Ethiopia’s Orthodox celebration of Epiphany, both the Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) and Orthopaedics teams had procedures scheduled to make up for Monday’s delays. The bags containing our medical supplies were delivered to the Hospital in the morning from a hold up in customs but each item still needed to be checked and rechecked by the Ministry of Health.
Once the bags were released, we unpacked so the teams could set up their ORs and the recovery room efficiently and expeditiously. While nurses arranged the rooms to their liking and the anesthesiologists set up their equipment, Dr. Andrew Howard and Dr. Blake Papsin reviewed their list of cases with their respective Fellow and Resident. As he waited for the patients to arrive, Dr. Papsin began pumping up some of the 20 or so soccer balls that the ENT team brought from home to hand out to patients in post-op.
Before I continue, I want to try and describe Black Lion Hospital to you. Obviously, it is very, very different from SickKids. Its architecture is similar to many other buildings in Addis Ababa, with its angular beige Communist-era, Eastern-block construction. Unlike the brightly decorated walls and immaculately clean spaces at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Black Lion has very few embellishments and a much-less-than-what-I-am-used-to level of cleanliness. With the exception of the newly donated cardiac unit (which, according to one of the No Boundaries anesthesiologists who was invited for a tour, apparently rivals SickKids), most of the wards are hot and stuffy, cramped and run down.
Walking the halls is an assault on every one of your senses. The beds and equipment are antiquated and inadequate. There are people everywhere – sitting on benches waiting for loved ones, sleeping in the halls waiting for treatment and visiting with in-patients. Some people are laughing, others are crying. Some people are well and others are sick, some with illnesses and injuries that gave me pause, to say the least. All of the hallways on the ground floor open to a green space filled with tables and tents, where people have congregated to wait, eat and pray. The waiting room for the Emergency Room is outside. In the OR unit, the sterile spaces are separated from the non-sterile ones by a green line painted on the ground. We are all required to wear scrubs and caps and booties in the sterile areas (even outside the ORs) and yet they perform operations with the windows open. 
They do so much with so little here. They are understaffed, undertrained and undersupplied. During my visit, I watched many of the Black Lion doctors and nurses stick like glue to their SickKids counterparts, who patiently explained procedures and fielded questions. One such memorable example was during the ENT surgery where Dr. Papsin and his team created an eardrum and ear canal for a young girl named Hana who was born with an underdeveloped ear. It was an amazing opportunity for knowledge transfer, and for the SickKids team to learn about the challenges that the Black Lion teams face every day.