We were up with the sun today making coffee in the wonderful coffee machine that Sophie left behind full of hope and plans for the day ahead. First things first of course – which meant a quick turn around the hippodrome (horse track) sharing mud and puddles with all the little boys of Bamako who were up and at’em bright and early too. It was marvelous to run in that big open space – the only place in Bamako where you can see the hills beyond and the sky above and you really get a true sense of the vastness of this space that is Mali (Check it out on Google Earth and you’ll see). This is bigger than Texas and I mean it. And about as much to get your arms around.
By that I mean it has taken us forEVAH as they say in Rhode Island to get the official OK to start our work on building the HIV clinic in Mali – as many of you know we planned to start building more than 12 months ago- but bureaucratic delay and paperwork got in the way and so I am delighted to say that today – we brought our official “papers” to a meeting with the Sikoro ASACOMSI (the committee that runs the clinic at Sikoro) and they called the builders to come speak to us and as soon as it makes sense – now it is up to us to decide – we’re going to go ahead and start building! The builders today said they only need to know two days ahead and they can start. . . the Centre d’Espoir (Hope Center) clinic will be built in 4 months. Did I really say that? I can’t believe it myself. We are moving mountains in Mali by sheer perseverance. As Sophie would say – we are the queens of ‘tetue”.
So there was a big meeting in Sikoro with Maggie and me in the middle of it, and the whole team was there – the president of the ASACO Guide, and the midwives and the doyen (old man) and Tounkara and the doctor who runs the clinic (Kone) and the nurses and Rokia the women’s association representative and the young and old and one and all. We gave them the labtracker computer to save patients’ data and connected it up to the internet (that didn’t work but tomorrow I am sure it will). Maggie will start tomorrow, inputting the data from the patients who are already being followed at the clinic and showing the doctor how to do it and pull out data from the program itself. This will be a key tool in our “model clinic” plan because it puts us way ahead of all of the other clnics – a first world intervention in the backwaters of Mali, in a clinic built of mud and cement, on a road paved with stones, beyond the market full of tomatoes and oranges and stray dogs and the road where the camels walk in from Timbuktu. We’re bringing the first world to Sikoro and changing lives and stopping HIV in its tracks.
Did I tell you that we’ve helped test more than 2700 women and found 84 HIV seropositives (and frequently tested their partners too) and given nevirapine to 31 of the 34 who had their babies at the center and followed more than 3/4 of them after their deliveries? Do you know that more than 52 patients are being followed right now, and what a miracle that is after having only 16 to show for all of our efforts just barely 6 months ago? The GAIA Mali team is amazing – we know we’ll have more than 100 patients by December and that’s why I need to call on you, and you, and you! to help me raise money for the clinic so that we can do what we set out to do – make access to care possible for the poorest of the poor, giving hope where hope is needed, changing lives, healing children, building hope.
We took pictures by the mango tree at the end of our meeting – you may not recall but we planted that tree three years ago with the chief and today the tree is not a whole lot taller but it is healthy and whole despite the rain, dust, children and rough life that surrounds it – as strong as our belief that we can do what we came to do here, that our work will grow tall and green and eventually bear fruit. I can taste that day, today, when I know for sure that mountains can be moved, that we can build our clinic, that there is wireless internet in Sikoro and we can do this, yes we can, together.