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Dear Family and Friends,
It seems that the pace of activities here at the hospital continues to increase. During the past ten days, we have had visits from an inspection team from Loma Linda University and a site visit from our project officer at USAID. These visits went very well but required extra work for preparation. In addition to the clinical work at the hospital, we are working with a group of cancer experts to improve and extend the cancer treatment capabilities of Mbingo. If things go according to plans, we will add radiation therapy to the surgical and medical treatment options we currently have. One exciting event this week was the return of Dr. Francine Kouya (one of the first graduates of the CIMS residency training) from a two-year medical oncology fellowship in South Africa.
We are currently working getting everything ready to install the new CT scanner in the new outpatient building. Along with other equipment, this will give us a very much improved capability in this area. Work on the hydroelectric project continues. We are expecting to order the turbine shortly. This project is taking a long time but will be very important in the overall development of the hospital. We still need about $600,000 out of the needed $2 million to complete the project.
We are working on recruiting the next class of residents for CIMS. Because of the difficulties of registering the training programs with the government, it makes recruitment more difficult. In spite of that, we are having interest from a number of well-qualified, young Christian physicians. We are planning to take four new residents to begin training in August. This will make sixteen in total currently in the program. We will have graduated nine Internists after this next graduation.
About a month ago, Nancy and I, along with Dr. Jim and Carolyn Brown, spent a week in India visiting the large Mission Hospital at Vellore. We were very amazed at the size and volume of work that is done there and their commitment to serve the poor as a Christian Hospital. We hope to be able to partner with them and send our residents there for part of their training and for Fellowship specialization training after graduation.
During August of this year, Nancy and I are planning to have a major celebration here at Mbingo. It will be my 70th birthday and our 50th wedding anniversary, and we intend to include our retirement party, even though we are not planning to retire immediately. We think it will be good to just have one big celebration!
Thank you for your partnership with us in the ministry here.
Dennis and Nancy