Yates Family In Soddo

 Meet Yeab and Hiyab These two babies born at 31 weeks gestation (or 9 weeks early) are pictured here doing simultaneous Kangaroo Mother Care and Kangaroo Father Care.  Yeab and Hiyab mean which mean Belonging to God and Gift from God in Amharic.  They were born at the same time from the same mother, but were born at very different sizes. Yeab was 1.9kg (4lb and 3 oz) at birth and sister Eyab was 630g (1lb and 6 oz) at birth. Eyab is our smallest surviving baby in our NICU to date!  I am so proud of the hard work our Neonatal staff has done to keep these two babies alive and growing! I never grow tired of seeing God's creation, watching his beloved children grow and mature right before my eyes and see the love between the mother and father and their precious children.

  "Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty.” Zechariah 4:6  In March of this year, we invited a consultant team from the christian academy of African physicians to come to Soddo Christian Hospital to perform a feasibility study on starting a family medicine residency. You can read more about the organization here (https://www.caaphome.org/).   We toured all over Ethiopia meeting with representatives from the two other premier family medicine residency programs in Addis Ababa at Addis Ababa University and at St Pauls Millenium Medical College. We met with the federal ministry of health, and representatives from several other possible affiliate hospitals for this program.  We learned from the MOH's National specialty roadmap that in the next 10 years Ethiopia wants to deploy over 5,000 family medicine physicians to their primary hospitals to be the consultant to the primary care physician. Most primary care hospitals currently do not h...

This week was an emotional week for me. We accepted a transfer from a local primary hospital for a 30 week neonate born there, but with significant breathing problems. We received the child after a long ambulance ride (about 2-3 hours). He was on oxygen, but cold, hypoxic and having a really difficult time breathing. Thank you so much for the generous donation from ONY biotech we were able to provide this child with a life saving medication called Infasurf (a form of surfactant). This medicine is a protein given directly into the lungs. Premature babies are born without this protein and it makes their lungs very stiff.  With this medication, the lungs become more compliant and able to diffuse oxygen into the blood stream better. This medicine is very difficult and very expensive to find in Ethiopia and we have been able to provide it free to our patients.  This child has had a long road of recovery, but is doing well and getting stronger every day.  But the hospital's ben...