A new project for our Club for 2023 is to help a fledgling hospital in Tumbu, Sierra Leone, West Africa. Tumbu is a remote town 47km south (1.5 hours) of Sierra Leone's major port of Freetown.

Rotary colleague Ibrahim Barrie has asked our Club to support his endeavours to source medical equipment, such as hospital beds, to allow this new hospital to open in early to mid 2023.  < read more about the hospital itself here >

We started by talking to our Rotary Donations in Kind team, to see how much of the needed equipment they had already in their massive Edinburgh warehouse. And the answer was "plenty"! Certainly enough to fill a 40 foot shipping container.

As a guide ... in total about $600,000 worth of medical supplies, including theatre barouches, operating tables, 30 hospital beds, defibrillators, medical scanners and monitors, wheelchairs and much, much more. We’ll even be shipping a flat-packed playground! See the Download in the Right Hand column to get an even better feel for the variety of equipment earmarked to dispatch.

We're also looking into send a generator(s) to give the Hospital a back up power supply, noting the government infrastructure in this region at the moment is not tested or known to be reliable. If you can help with sourcing these, we'd appreciate hearing from you.

Now comes the hard parts! Sourcing a container and shipping it safely and economically to West Africa.

Current investigations indicate the need to raise around $25,000 to enable us to purchase a good quality container and transport it all the way to Tumbu (Tombo).

The detail required to make this happen is quite extraordinary to ensure the container arrives safely in Freetown, ready to be loaded to a truck for the final transport of 1.5 hours to Tumbu.

And the story gets better from here ... When the Container arrives in Tumbu, it doesn't go to waste. The local project team have already worked out they can repurpose it to create a 'Training Facility' for the local doctors and nursing teams.

The beauty of connectivity in Rotary Worldwide, is a wonderful organisation born out of Rotary called Interplast who have for many years specialised in training medical teams overseas in techniques to handle all manner of health care. COVID made life difficult, BUT saw the Interplast team move toward developing a suite of Online Training modules. They have kindly offered to look into ways to enable the local Tumbu team access these valuable training videos to upskill their local team.

If you think you can contribute to this project, we would love to hear from you. Either phone us on 08) 7444 5086 or slide an email through to International@RotaryAdelaideCentral.org.au

With our thanks ...