WEEK THREE IN KOWAK,  17 March, Saint Patrick’s Day

It’s Sunday morning and I’m driving Fr Conard to his to masses at the local parish churches. The first mass starts in a few minutes so I’m in the car until it starts. I’ll just skip the second and type in the car if my battery holds out. He had a difficult week at the hospital. First our young doctor resigned without any suggestions that he would not renew his 1^st one year contract. We really don’t know why yet. His wife and child live 4 hours south in Mwanza so that may be a factor, of course, but he would never admit a women has influence over him. Anyway the new AMO (doctor’s assistant) is doing very well and is a better surgeon, so that helps. He just retired and moved here a few months ago.

A young nurse was caught stealing meds one night this week and was fired. This upset several of the medical staff, including the doctor, and a new CO (clinical officer). The other CO supported the sisters (administrators) and said all the others are stealing meds also instead of giving them to the patients on the night shift, so they don’t want any procedures to change their source of extra income. Anyway, a few days later the doctor resigned and then Fr Conard and Sr Teresa got a call the next day from the DMO (district medical officer) to come to a meeting at his office. He basically said if the young doctor was not given full administrative control of the hospital he would have it demoted to a Health Clinic and we would loose any funds given by the federal government so expansion and training (basket fund). He is still mad because he had to return the $6,000 of basket fund he stole from us last year in a fake audit. So yesterday I drove Fr Conard and Sr Teresa into Musoma to meet with the bishop, who owns the hospital, and his lawyer and the human resources manager. The meeting went well and the sister felt much better, with hope that they would be able to stay and not return to Indian.

While they were in their meeting I did some shopping for the mission and school (food and supplies) and had lunch with the Maryknoll Lay Missioners who were all working on the new home of our oldest missioner, Liz Mach. She works for the bishop now so wanted to move closer to the office. The three new lay missioners finish language school on Holy Thursday and head to Mwanza so it was good to see them again before they depart this area. Vikki also came in with our head master. She bought a TV and dish so was in a hurry to get home and get it installed. I bought 40 seedling fruit trees ((35 cents each) for the school as part of the project of our Utah volunteer Henry. He has an area cleared and fence post up near the school pig pen. So they will start running barbed wire Monday and getting the seedlings in the ground. Henry took a group of 20 students from the environmental club to the Agro Forestry nursery in Musoma last Friday and they all enjoyed it very much. They then had lunch on the beach of Lake Victoria and a few had to jump in, uniforms and all.