Final Leg

Sitting now on the plane for the final 20 minute flight from Conakry to Freetown. I've now been traveling for close to 30 hours starting with the airport shuttle at 4 am yesterday then a 5 hour flight from LA to DC, then 10 hours from DC to Brussels (thanks to a 3 hour snow and ice delay in DC), and now the 9 hours from Brussels to Freetown. When we arrive there, it's a ferry to get from the airport to the capital (apparently one of the only airports in the world cut off like this). The guidebooks actually say to take a helo flight from airport to mainland due to unreliable ferry schedules and theft-but our local contact says it's the way to go.

This being my first trip to West Africa, and at a time when the Ebola epidemic is still keeping planes like mine full of aid workers (there's a whole team of 20+ people who've been with us since DC from Partners in Health) and post trip quarantines still in place for doctors, I'm not sure exactly what to expect between that and the reports coming out that new cases are rapidly declining and ebola treatment units are empty. I mostly expect to see things having returned to "normal" in Sierra Leone and Liberia but since I've never been, I don't know what normal looks like.

There will surely be new standards and customs for how people interact and touch each other, for how doctors and nurses see and treat patients, and how these folks see the international community that's descended upon them. One of the reasons ebola got so out of control here, is because the local medical providers never have had enough personal protective gear, things like gloves and masks and gowns that we take for granted, to prevent the spread. Now that has to be standard.

I'm here in my role with Direct Relief to first take stock of what we've done as an organization here over the past 6 months. As the largest private provider of medical supplies into the region since ebola, there's a lot to check on.

But more importantly,  it's to form some strong partnerships with local officials so we can formally commit to a longer-term high level of support to the region. This part of Africa already had some of the worst health indicators in the world, and now on the back of the worst ebola epidemic in history, they can surely use some extended support.

Thankfully, we already have some amazing local partners here, folks whose organizations are taking care of poor people on a daily basis, and they of course jumped headfirst into the Ebola response. We'll be spending the next two weeks with them.

After two days in Freetown meeting with the Ministry of Health and seeing the larger hospitals, we'll head out to Makeni, where we've supported all the graduates of the midwifery school with the tools they need to work and has unfortunately not re-opened yet since ebola. Then out to Bo overnight, the 2nd largest city in Sierra Leone. Then a helicopter ride to Kono district where we've been supporting a group called Wellbody Alliance for a number of years who have now teamed up with Partners in Health.

From there we'll take a UN Humanitarian Air Service flight from Freetown to Monrovia to meet with the officials in Liberia, as well as our colleagues at Clinton Health Access. Then a day tour with a partner Africare who supports a lot of capacity building and health care programs, and finally some time way out in the bush in Grand Geddeh with Last Mile Health, a fantastic Boston - based NGO that's taken Paul Farmers model of the community health worker to combat the childhood pneumonia, the biggest killer of children under 5 here.

More to come...