Unpacking the containers…

”The Lord is my shephard, I lack nothing… He Refreshes my soul.. he guide me along the right paths” Ps 23

I arrived safely to Dakar on Monday late evening October 18th. It was very hot outside and it really reminded where i was when i walked out from the airplane and in to the airport… It feels somtimes very strange to move so quickly to one place to another, to go from your door in the morning and suddenly be in a hot country some hours later.

I needed to wait alot for my bags, think they was the last onces… I used that time to exchange some money. I was really relieved when i saw my bags, specially the one with medical supply with all IV tubings. I picked up this IV-tubings on Thursday afternoon and brought 200 IV tubing ( infusions aggregat) with me from Göteborg. Everything went well in the customs, I got a stamp in my passport and… the only paper they was interested to look at was my PCR test. I don’t need a Visa to be here as a Swedish citizen, I can stay for three months if I like to…

I stay in a hotel and everyone in the team have been in quarantine for 48 h. I printed some docuements and organized all patient charts during my Quarantine, it was really nice to be busy.

Me and another team member, my friend Beger from Benin, came out from the quarantine the same time and he smiled when we met in the dinning room. Linda who is our great teamleader, told us to come down to the dining room if the test was negative and I was already there when Beger came. He hold his PCR test up in the air, very high and said, I’m not pregnant. We had a big laugh together and did a selfie. I was not pregnent either… haha. Glad that the PCR tests was negative, good to be out!

The Container have been sitting in the port for some time… but was released on Monday and it was a huge thing. An answer of prayer! The container came in to Senegal many weeks ago and the bright sun and the heat make the container very hot inside. Because of the heat, we was not sure how much it had infect our supply. The first thing we saw was this big box of eye medicine, our ship pharmacist recommended us to throw all medicine and not use them, so we put that specific box on the side. It was really sad to know that we can´t use this medicine, they look so inocent but all needed to be destroyed because of the heat.. what a wased and it felt so terrible to let it go. Dr Badiane will buy all the medication we need locally so we will be fine.

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The container are located at the HOPE CENTER. This big place used to be filled with patients who have had their surgery done on the ship, or are waiting for surgery onboard. This patient hotel is so empty now but the Hope center have still an Security office and are secured 24/7. They helped us to open the sealed door on the container, it was a bigger job than i thought. We needed a really big pliers to break the big spike to come in to the container.. It was great fun to digg in to our stuff … it felt like christmas!

Me and my friend Missy, also an OR colleague from the ship, are here too. It is great. We organized the supply and all intraocular lenses today. Just before i left Sweden, i keept hearing in my head that I needed to bring zip lock bags, so i took everyone I had in my kitchen and put them all in the supply bag. After some time, i open the bag again and saw all this zip lock bags that I had put in and realized that they took a lots of space… so I took them out… but it felt like my arms and hands was magnetic… I saw my hands swinging back again and I put all three big pachange of zip lock bags back in to the luggage again. I was thinking of this Zip lock bags alot on the flight and I asked God many time why I should take them with me… Yesterday night i suddenly realized the I needs lots of zip lock bags. Some of the supply from the container was very durty and to dusty to put straight in to the operating room so we brought the supply with us to the hotel. When me and Missy organized the supplys in my hotel room, we cleaned all durty things first and took out some supplies from their original boxes, and put the sterile packages in this clean zip lock bags… A great way to protected them from dust and from humidity. Thank you God, you are in every little small detail!

Thank you for your prayers during this eye project. The Lord is our shephard! / Blessings, Anneli