A Doctor in Africa by Dr Andrew Browning

Author:Dr Andrew Browning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

BIRTH OF THE BARBARA MAY FOUNDATION

Throughout Ethiopia, the various tribes have different cultures and belief systems surrounding pregnancy and delivery. For example, the Gumuz tribe, which is based west of Bahir Dar, has a custom which dictates a pregnant woman will go alone into the forest at about 38 weeks pregnant and stay there by herself until she has delivered her child. She will either die by herself in labour or survive and return with a baby. It’s very difficult to encourage these women to come to hospital to have their babies, so trying to improve the maternal health of these sorts of women is incredibly challenging. To be able to help with a particular people’s group, you need to be working in the community, know the language and culture and have their trust. This is where my Aunt Val comes in.

Val and I had been dreaming of a maternity hospital for the people of the Afar since 2005. I had been struggling to find the necessary interest and funds but things had moved forward, although very slowly. A friend from the St Thomas Anglican Church in North Sydney was now an architect in a large Sydney-based firm. I approached him to draw up some plans and with a supportive boss, he leapt at the chance.

The challenge for my friend Michael Rogers was to build a hospital in the world’s hottest inhabited area, an area that had poor infrastructure and poor building materials. Michael came up with a double roof design in an effort to keep the building cool using a simple but functional design to capture the prevailing winds. (Unfortunately, when it came to it, the local builders couldn’t fully implement the impressive design with the materials they had available.)

The regional government was supportive and donated a piece of rocky desert land on the outskirts of a small town called Mille, right in the middle of the Afar region in northern Ethiopia. This was a great location. So far so good. In 2007, we had a design and land but no funds. The idea of the maternity hospital for the Afar region was by now a couple of years old, but, unfortunately, we were not getting closer to it becoming a reality and I was becoming frustrated.

The frustration was most likely amplified because I was feeling jaded. In 2008, we had been planning the Mille hospital as well as working in Bahir Dar, Afar and other places in Africa for seven years with very few, if any, breaks. Being the only doctor in the Bahir Dar fistula hospital, I was on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Generally, this was OK as most of the patients were stable, but we did have up to 80 patients at any one time in the hospital and I’d have to review most of them at least daily. At the same time, we had a continual stream of trainees coming to learn some of the new surgical techniques I had been able to develop in my time in Africa.

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