JFK Hospital

Today is Armed Forces Day in Liberia, a national holiday, so we had the day off from work. However, a tour had been arranged for us at JFK Hospital, one of the best hospitals in the country and West Africa overall. The quick story behind the naming of the hospital is that former Liberian President William Tubman visited the U.S. in the early 1960s and met with President Kennedy. When the U.S. President asked Tubman what he needed back at home, the answer was a state-of-the-art hospital. The U.S. came through with funding, and Liberia honored JFK by naming the 500+ bed hospital after him. Throughout the 60s and 70s, it was a fully functioning hospital, so highly regarded that people were flown in from throughout the region to be seen there.

The hospital that we saw today is, unbelievably, still considered one of the best in the region, but it's a shell (almost literally) of its former self. Only one floor of the four story hospital is used to house patients, though there is an adjacent hospital building that functions as a maternity ward, and a third as a triage and emergency room. The upper floors of the main building were incredibly eerie. Having been stripped of everything years ago by looters and squatters, there is nothing to see but long hallways leading to empty room after empty room. Doorjambs have rusted over, walls have been broken so that people could access pipes or re-route certain wires, some elevator doors had been removed, and a rusted elevator car that had stopped mid-ride was visible. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t standing in a completely abandoned building; there is a functioning medical facility one floor below. At various points during the war, different NGOs came in to serve the wounded and the sick as best they could; and there was a powerful reminder of their presence in a fading Medecins Sans Frontieres sign glued to a wall on in an otherwise unmarked tiled wall.

Currently there are only 30 doctors in all of Liberia. Most health professionals left during the war and haven't returned (their status as political refugees in the U.S. was recently renewed by President Bush). While staff at the hospital does perform surgeries, deliver babies, and set casts, like a hospital in the U.S. would, it does so with extremely limited resources and no frills. But there are stark differences between JFK and any hospital I’ve ever seen in the U.S. The power at the hospital, like everywhere else in the country, is unreliable, and sometimes goes out. There is no air conditioning, and some of the rooms we walked into were extremely hot. Patients’ meals are cooked in a small pantry each day; there is one woman tasked with purchasing groceries for the hospital. Ironically, the pantry is built off of a huge kitchen with four walk-in freezers, a formerly state of the art ventilation system, and enough space to prepare meals for 750+ patients and staff. Most of the kitchen equipment was looted during the war and very little remains.

I realize so much of this sounds negative, but I don’t want to ignore the fact that this hospital – a symbol of pride and regional strength – is still operational and doing good work for as many Liberians as it can support. Doctors from around the world come for short periods of time to volunteer, and there are plans to renovate and repair the existing structure.

Every day here there are clear indications of the differences between the developing and the developed world. However I think that in the back of my mind I have been holding on to the notion that things I would consider essential and basic, things that as humans we are all entitled to – like expert, comprehensive medical care, and a safe, secure place to be treated quickly when you are seriously ill – just had to exist here. How could they not? I guess that in a post-conflict country, there are no guarantees, and people and institutions do the best they can with whatever they have. It’s nice that I was able to get a lesson in minimalism and a big reality check, but I really just wish that today we had toured a state-of-the-art hospital in Monrovia, serving 500+ people in great need of medical care.