the divine supply chain
A container arrived this week, loaded with pediatric, obstetric, and surgical equipment. Getting containers to Kenya is massive headache, endless forms, money for shipping, money for customs. It is a long, complicated process. . .one of our colleagues worked two years for this one. But, as Arianna says, it is miraculous.
The container arrived on Sunday and was unloaded.
The first item we pulled out Monday was a bilirubin lamp called a giraffe light. We took it to the biomedical department, let them assemble and test it, and then rolled it to newborn nursery (NICU). In the hallway is Bishop, senior nurse, who saw the light and asked with large eyes, “what is that?”
“It’s a portable bilirubin lamp,” Arianna responded.
“Do you know what I was doing right now? I was looking for boxes to stack and make our bilirubin lamps the proper height. You brought exactly what I needed!”
Legendary biomedical technical support leader for World Medical Mission, Jim Moore, calls this “God’s On-Demand Supply Chain.”
He tells the story of going to hospital in Ghana, losing a his supplies in transit, arriving at the hospital to repair the broken motherboard on a piece of equipment he had traveled around the world to fix. . .which he might have a hope of doing with a soldering iron – if his soldering iron were not 32,000 feet above in the West-African sky.
So he says a quick prayer, and asks if there is any old equipment around, and is led out into the desert to the equipment graveyard. Halfway buried in the sand, he finds not a soldering iron, but a motherboard. The same motherboard he has come to repair. And it works.
Of course it does.
The other things in the container – new incubators, heaters for newborn babies, monitors, four more bilirubin lights. In the next 3 days, we pulled them out one by one. For the first incubator, it meant a mom who has lost 3 other babies will have a place for her tiny premature baby when he or she is born this week. We didn’t have to send her away because of the box that has been two years in transit.
For a baby with dangerously high bilirubin, Arianna called me from a busy call night because the blue light bank light, that has been working for 5 years, was overheating and causing one of her babies to have fever. I came in, reassembled the new lights with a fan connected, and Voila! . . . safer lights at the moment we needed them.
I was walking around the ICU last week and saw a nurse taking a preemie out of an incubator to hold. She stretched out her arms, and I snapped the picture – knowing immediately it may be one of the best pictures I would ever take.
What I didn’t know at the time, is who this baby was.
An orphaned twin, premature, her sibling didn’t survive.
But Aneesa, tiny though she is, diaper up to her armpits, is a fighter.
I happened to be in the ICU that day to take a picture of a little girl who would need a fundraising campaign for her hospital stay because she has no worldly family. She happened to be wide awake and ready to announce her presence.
Of course it happened.
Because He knows, He cares, and He is working all things for our good.
(recurring donations after Aneesa is discharged will go to the Needy Children’s Fund to help other pediatric patients – we are so unbelievably grateful for those who have given)