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...

A few weeks ago, I attended a conference in Tanzania called Every Breathe Counts. It was me, two of my colleagues from Soddo Christian Hospital and a general practitioner from St Mary's Catholic Primary Hospital.  One of the most interesting parts of the conference was looking at the data from the "Global Burden of Disease" as published by Lancet. This is what I have seen, but didn't have numbers to describe it. Out of all the deaths per year documented in Ethiopia, the LARGEST box, which indicated the largest number of deaths per year, is from neonatal causes.  This is what motivates us each year to keep getting better, keep learning, keep improving, keep teaching, keep expanding.   This conference was amazing! It was 200 neonatal medical providers from 9 countries in Africa. It was a dream come true. This walk of caring for tiny babies, that some believe have no hope for life, is sacred and precious. The deep sorrows and the high joys of this journey taking care ...

Last December, the medical director from a local primary hospital, St Mary's Dubbo Catholic Primary Hospital, contacted us about helping them start a newborn unit at their hospital.  We were honored to be able to help them. In their hospital they have up to 10 deliveries a day, and didn't have a dedicated newborn unit/NICU. They also only have general practitioners at their hospital. There is no family medicine physician, pediatrician or obstetrician at their hospital. Their medical director coordinated with us to send on of their general practitioner doctors, who was only a few months out of medical school, and three nurses. After being trained at SCH they would be tasked to run the newborn unit in their hospital. We have been able to help with their training, donate some supplies, and bring their GP for further training to an excellent NICU conference in Tanzania.  They launched their new department earlier this year. It has been such an encouragement to see the work of our ...

Last week we started on the foundation of the New Hope Women's and Children's Center. This was a really special day to celebrate all God has done in our women's and children's center and the celebrate all God will continue to do.    It reminded me of the song: God of Revival by Bryan Johnson  'Cause there's no prison wall You can't break through, no Mountain You can't move, all things are possible There's no broken body you can't raise, no Soul that You can't save, all things are possible   The darkest night, You can light it up You can light it up, oh God of revival LET HOPE ARISE , death is overcome You've already won, oh God of revival God of revival   On that day, I was standing there on this empty property and saw these beautiful Meskel flowers, which means flowers of the cross. I picked them up, root and all. Lord willing, I will return them when the new building is complete. Til then, they will have a home in my backyard waiting, h...

  Last year, we completed screening all 11,000 students ages 8-18 years old in Soddo town. This in itself is quite an accomplishment. Our team is very proficient at screening for early signs of rheumatic heart disease. The team is comfortable with the process caring for those students in Soddo, but now we are increasing our distance from Soddo. The area right outside of the city is called Soddo Zuria, it is essentially the ring of communities around Soddo. Getting started has been a challenge. We had to get additional letters of support from the zonal ministry of health and the school board. Getting permission from each of the schools has been hard work for my team, but I am so thankful to have such capable and dedicated staff. The school year just started a month ago and we have had four outreach events, one per week for the entire day. When the team comes back, they are tired and have been screening up to 270 students in one day using bedside echocardiography! That is over 1000 p...