Engineering in Mbingo

It has been an absolute whirlwind the last month and a half after leaving Banyo for Mbingo.  Our whole family was excited for months at the upcoming arrival of my brother Zack and friend Jessica.  They arrived safely although having to go through a ghost town in the largest city in our region due to the anglophone/francophone conflict.  My brother aka 'Dr. Zax' as he is called here was able to get involved right away with all the medical happenings around the hospital.  Everyone of course immediately fell in love with Zack and tried endlessly to figure out how to get him to stay forever.  He was able to perform many surgeries and has a sea of new crazy medical stories as you could imagine.  


Jessica and I jumped right in on a project to ultimately fix a challenge that was cursing the hospital for years now.  The challenge was that there is a linens cycle and if anything slows or stops the linens needed for a surgery, the operation cannot start, ultimately resulting in delayed patient care for critical surgeries.  As are many thing in Africa, there was a much more complex than anticipated set of variables that were causing the problem.  Our initial assumption was that the drying process was slowing things down and so we set out to build a more cost effective, higher throughput system to get things dry when it rains.  In the rainy season it is almost guaranteed to rain at least once every day.  Currently we have 2 large plots of land set aside to dry clothes on lines in the sun.

When things can't get dry we fall back to our 30,000 watt electric dryer similar to the one in your house only scaled up.

Electrical challenges in Africa are mainly caused by poor design/planning, maintenance and funding.  Adding the large electrical load of the dryer to our grid is expensive and will cause us to need to buy a new transformer sooner rather than later at best or blow out the current transfer at worst.  The new transformer is easily $60,000+.  Therefor reducing/eliminating the dryer would be cost effective and buy us time before needing to upgrade to a new transformer.


The next challenge is that the OR is hot and humid even with 12 AC units attached to it.

So now the fun begins.  We tried to think of every creative way of solving the problem.  From simple to completely insane, we tossed around every idea.  Jessica was able to put all the variables into her computer and kick out some terribly useful numbers.  Jessica is a friend of mine from college who specializes in mechanical engineering that relates to HVAC.  She has spent much of her professional life designing HVAC system in Colorado.  Her company was kind enough to let us use a laptop and specialized software which helps in solving challenges like this.

We spent nearly every day she was here working on different ideas.

We went ahead and prototyped what we felt was the best idea in our front yard.  Very simple really.  When it starts raining, release the lever and voila you have an instant tarp protecting your clothes from rain.

Obviously this was a scale model and the real system would need to be 50x larger but we wanted something to show the hospital administration to sell them on the idea.  I don't want to put you to sleep with too many technical details but needless to say the challenge is complex.  We presented several different ideas including this one to administration and a large collection of 'simple fixes' which should help make a big dent on the numerous challenges.  We also started another project to collect more data to help solve the procedural part of the linens challenge.  Their response was very positive and hopefully a tarp deploying system will be built before rainy season this year.

Zack and Jess both left and everyone was sad, especially Charlie.


A week later started IT Class.  I spent 6 days solid with the heads of IT from numerous CBC hospitals throughout Cameroon to train them to prepare their hospitals for the upcoming EMR (electronic medical records) installations.  This is class 1 or 3: upgrading their networks.  The class was pretty intense with 5 hours of lecture and labs per day.  I was very pleased with their performance and passion for the topic.  We even had our first female IT 'guy' who was one of our top students. 

I ran out of adrenaline after the 6th day and crashed hard today.  Sunday as a day of rest is a great idea.  Tomorrow starts another new project...

Lori has been busy teaching Charlie through Kindergarten, visiting with Fulbe patients at the hospital and keeping all of our taste buds very happy.