Health Center in Assueme, Cote d'Ivoire

Friends and relatives have been known to ask what I do when I travel to countries such as Cote d'Ivoire. A lot of what I do can be pretty boring and revolves around the managerial and administrative aspects of keeping a large project moving forward (our HIV/AIDS program in CI is funded at about $15,000,000 a year, so it involves quite a bit of management to function, of which I contribute a bit, mostly the sort of higher level "are we going in the direction we wanted to go" sort.

But I also do things that are closer to where the real purpose of the work lies. The photo above is of a health center in norther Cote d'Ivoire right on the Ghanaian border. Kathy and I went there to see how they were doing implementing a Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV program jointly supported by Elizabeth Glaser and PATH (you can see the shiny new EGPAF car we drove up in). The site is run by a nurse-midwife who has a staff of 5 others ranging from nurses to a janitor. Not shown in the picture are two small houses to the right where the nurse-midwife and one of the nurses (male, older) live.

The site has running water and electricity and even, somewhat surprisingly, air conditioning (it was close to 100 degrees outside when this picture was taken). 30 women a month start prenatal care here and they each come in 3-4 times before they deliver. 15 or so deliver in this site each month. This number is lower than the prenatal care number because this site, located in a small village, draws some prenatal care clients from a larger town 6 miles away, and women from that town who go into labor in the middle of the night (as women are wont to do), cannot get transportation at that time out to this site, so they deliver in town at the local hospital.

All in all this was an impressive little health center: the staff was interested in expanding their services; the programs that we support were running well; they were eager for any advice that we could give them; and, they were committed to their patients. I wouldn't be surprised that if over the next year they didn't end up offering treatment services as well as PMTCT.