The last stop on my West Africa trip in April was Liberia, and anyone who has ever been there will recognize the photo above as most certainly a regular sighting in that country.
I lived in Monrovia, Liberia in 2018 for about eight months; it was intended to be a long-term move, but as I got integrated into the work and life in Monrovia, it was clear that the job wasn’t right, and I wasn’t right, and things in general just weren’t set up in a way that would promote flourishing for any of us. I’m grateful for that experience and I learned a lot, but I was also anxious about returning to Liberia and facing some of those really hard things again; thankfully, while I did manage some stressful situations, overall the trip was a success!
I was relieved, after many days in Francophone countries, to be returning to a place where communication was easier, and I was also relieved when the three flights it took for me to get from Dakar to Monrovia all went on without disruption. The apartment I was staying at was next door to an old friend and my colleague from Ethiopia was already there, and thankfully all of this trip was in the same time zone so I was well acclimated upon arrival and able to jump right in to the action. So many things to be grateful for from day one!
This was my first NeuroKids trip to actually see and participate in a surgeon training. Similarly to our previous trip to Kijabe, Kenya, Meski, my colleague from Ethiopia, was there to train our new coordinator, and we had both arrived a few days before the surgeon training was supposed to start. I’m so glad we planned it that way, because upon arrival, we realized that we didn’t have the right cleaning materials for the equipment and we hadn’t gotten an patient files for training, among other random things that needed sorting, so I spent some time trying to figure out those things while also meeting with and making critical connections with people at the Ministry of Health, without whom we could not run our programs!
It was a busy few days with more surprises than I would generally like to experience, but we managed to get what we needed, some at the very last minute. The next few days were surgeon training, where more surprises awaited us – the cautery tool didn’t work as intended, the sterilizing processes was new to everyone, and the anesthesia team struggled to get intravenous lines into the patients. BUT, thankfully, we were able to accomplish much of what we intended to accomplish; patients got surgery, the surgeon and the coordinator learned a lot, and we as a programs team also came away with many different ideas of how we can improve the training and prevent some of these issues in the future.
Let us begin 