Rx for pediatric ward

 

 

A father waits by the side of his child, who is being treated for malaria at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana.

As Robert Grantham was preparing to serve as governor of District 7170 (New York, USA), he thought about what he wanted to do during his 2002-03 term.

“I had it in my head, I wanted to develop a relationship with a district in Africa,” Grantham says.

His desire moved closer to becoming reality at the 2001 RI Convention in San Antonio, Texas, USA, when he met Robert Atta, the 2002-03 governor of District 9100, which covers 14 countries in West Africa.

He and Atta, a member of the Rotary Club of Accra, Ghana, hit it off. “Both our visions of what Rotary could do and how we could work together seemed to mesh,” says Grantham, of the Rotary Club of Cortland Breakfast, N.Y.

So they decided to focus on Atta’s homeland of Ghana. They started off by swapping Group Study Exchange teams, then undertook their first joint service project, which provided US$100,000 worth of insecticide-treated mosquito nets for children and pregnant women to protect them from malaria. While three Rotarians from District 7170 were distributing the nets in Ghana in 2004, they visited Accra’s Korle Bu Teaching Hospital.

“This is the largest and most medically advanced hospital in Ghana,” says Gary Herzig, of the Rotary Club of Oneonta, N.Y., who visited the facility. “We weren’t prepared for the lack of equipment and basic medical supplies, or even finding women who were waiting to give birth or who had just given birth sleeping on floors because there were no beds.”

The team decided to help furnish the maternity and pediatric wards with equipment by partnering with the International Medical Equipment Collaborative, a U.S.-based nonprofit that collects donated, used medical equipment and prepares it for shipping to developing countries. The organization rounded up about $348,800 worth of equipment for the hospital, but it needed someone to finance storing, repairing, boxing, and transporting the items, which included beds, examination tables, wheelchairs, and infant scales. Answering the call, eight clubs in District 7170 donated a total of $9,130. That district, along with districts 9100, 6400 (Ontario, Canada; Michigan, USA), and 7190 (New York, USA) chipped in a combined $18,000, and The Rotary Foundation provided a $22,565 Matching Grant.

In October, four Rotarians from District 7170 traveled to Ghana to unload, inventory, and set up the equipment. (The Foundation funded their travel expenses with a $6,000 Volunteer Service Grant.) They also vaccinated children against polio during a National Immunization Day (NID), gave out mosquito nets, and met with staff members at several health care facilities in Accra to assess their needs and see about providing them with equipment in the future.

Grantham says he’s grateful to the district governors who succeeded him for donating time, energy, and money during their terms in office to support the projects in Ghana. “It’s so much easier to make an impact in an area when you’ve got the support of more than one administration,” he says.