Vice President of Zambia visits SFH

February 2007 at St Francis' Hospital will be remembered as a month of Ministerial visits, especially as these are so unusual at a rural mission hospital. Ever since the newly refurbished medical wards had been completed in late 2006 we had been trying to arrange for the Vice President of the Republic of Zambia to open them. The decision to invite the Vice President (VP) was made by the Chair of the Hospital Board, Bishop William Muchombo, Anglican Bishop of Eastern Diocese and had sound reasoning behind it. The VP is from our Province and knows the hospital well from his time as a pupil at Katete Boarding School, a mission school run by the Reformed Church of Zambia. In November 2006 we were 3 days away from the opening ceremony when we found out that the VP knew nothing about the ceremony and clearly wasn’t coming as he had other engagements. Well, inviting someone as important as the VP is a very political issue and somewhere someone had not communicated to his office. Management was all for giving up and inviting a lesser dignitary just to open the already occupied wards. Bishop William wasn’t for giving up; he was still very keen for the VP to come.

January and particularly February have seen extremely heavy rains with widespread flooding. As Eastern Province had been particularly badly hit the VP made a tour of the Province, particularly the Luangwa Valley to see the extent of the damage. He found roads impassable, bridges washed away, crops drowned in the fields. The VP heard of a young boy, who had been caught by a crocodile and decided to find out what had happened to him. He had been taken to a local clinic and then referred to St Francis' Hospital - about 230km, much of the journey on dirt roads. So it was that out of the blue, one busy Thursday morning the VP and his entourage swept into the hospital asking to see the boy bitten by the crocodile. I was in the Out Patient department, being Thursday it was extremely busy with Medical Clinic, Gynaecology Clinic, HIV Clinic and general outpatients a cross between Accident & Emergency and a GP’s surgery. I was already running late as the local police had needed a post mortem on a poor man who had been killed by his cousin with a blow from a hoe to the head. So there I was with a very busy clinic and someone comes to tell me that the VP is visiting the surgical ward. His Honour the Vice President of the Republic of Zambia - Rupiah Banda turned out to be a very gracious person and appears to have a real affinity for the ordinary people. He spent some time with the boy who unfortunately had to have one of his legs amputated.

As Mr Banda was so approachable I felt able to follow up our request for him to come and open the medical wards. He seemed very happy to do so, and advised how to make the arrangements. So on 23rd February after many letters, faxes and emails had passed back and forth, the VP came to open the medical wards, St Augustine and St Monica. This time it was a full official visit with a very large entourage. From early morning officials from the Office of the President arrived to ensure that everything was in place. We had spent almost a week getting the hospital ready, a bit of spring cleaning here and there, erecting a structure to support an enormous tarpaulin to protect the invited guests from the rain. Initially it was a bit difficult to motivate staff as they didn’t really believe that the VP was coming, but as we received confirmation of the visit there was a fantastic reaction, paint was found and areas that hadn’t seen paint for a long time were brightened up, even roofs were swept! Just as we had sorted out the official platform - seating arrangements are very important, a man from the Government building department in Chipata arrived with the ‘Presidential Dias’ - this clearly indicated the important of the occasion.

The Opening went very well, made particularly enjoyable by the affable presence of the Vice President himself. He almost totally ignored his scripted speech and told us how St Francis’ was his local hospital when he was a boy. He spent a great deal of time talking with the patients and also announced that following the reports on TV and in the Press of his visit to see the boy with the crocodile bite, K10,000,000 kwacha (nearly £1300) had been raised by the public and would be used to provide him with a good prosthesis in Lusaka and to continue his schooling. Within minutes of the end of the official opening there was quite a rain storm, an hour earlier and it would have washed out the ceremony!

The week before the official Vice President’s visit the new Minister of Health passed through on her familiarisation tour. She came at rather short notice and just before dark as she had been touring the rural health centres in the district. It was a chance to bring some of our concerns to her attention. She also commented that the wards were bigger than most she had seen on her tour and that the hospital was the busiest one she had visited.

Almost all visitors to St Francis' Hospital are make these remarks. I think they imagine a small Mission hospital with a couple of wards rather than a major referral hospital with over 300 inpatients, 4 specialist doctors, 7 very busy wards (sometimes with 50-60 patients on one ward), 3 operating theatres, all the support services and a campus with over 300 staff houses. Like a good politician she listened and said all the right things, only time will tell how much will come out of it!

So it was a busy month in terms of exposure in the media. Our eldest daughter, Amy, reported that many of her friends at school had seen her mum on television - she was rather proud! It can only be a good thing that the profile of the hospital is raised and more people are aware of the work that is going on. We give thanks to God that the visits went very well and we were able to demonstrate to many people that his work continues at St Francis’ Hospital.