Last Christmas, while she was directing Gimbie Adventist Hospital's Ethiopian nurse-training school, Carlton was invited to spend a festive evening with Catholic nuns at their teaching nunnery near the hospital. "Just when I thought the Christmas party was winding down, Sister Suzie brought out her guitar and we started singing in Quechua, Spanish, Amaric, Oroomo, and English," Carlton said. "We danced with the nuns, with the proselytes, we danced with each other. We danced till dawn and sang until our throats were parched and our feet were aching, and still Suzie strummed and drummed. Oh, it was fun! "Those nuns and their sisters are doing a good work all over Ethiopia. They truly practice the love I think Jesus called Christians to exhibit," Carlton said.
Bolivia RPCV Rebecca Carlton returns home from making carbon-copy health healers just like herself in the highlands of western Ethiopia
Angwin's Rebecca Carlton returns home from western Ethiopia
Angwin's Rebecca Carlton returns home from western Ethiopia
Herbert Ford Napa Valley Register |
Posted: Thursday, December 23, 2010 12:00 am | (0) Comments
If Christmas is all about giving, Angwin's Rebecca Carlton is Christmas.
Carlton, 33, has come home to Angwin for the first time in years for a Christmas "recharge" - home from Peace Corps volunteering in Bolivia, from binding up the broken and wounded with Doctors Without Borders on the blood-stained sands of Darfur in Sudan, and more recently from making carbon-copy health healers just like herself in the highlands of western Ethiopia.
Last Christmas, while she was directing Gimbie Adventist Hospital's Ethiopian nurse-training school, Carlton was invited to spend a festive evening with Catholic nuns at their teaching nunnery near the hospital.
"Just when I thought the Christmas party was winding down, Sister Suzie brought out her guitar and we started singing in Quechua, Spanish, Amaric, Oroomo, and English," Carlton said. "We danced with the nuns, with the proselytes, we danced with each other. We danced till dawn and sang until our throats were parched and our feet were aching, and still Suzie strummed and drummed. Oh, it was fun!
"Those nuns and their sisters are doing a good work all over Ethiopia. They truly practice the love I think Jesus called Christians to exhibit," Carlton said.
In her Bolivian Peace Corps service of more than two years, Carlton did health education with women's groups, and also worked as a nutrition consultant to a municipal hospital.
Carlton's time with Doctors Without Borders in Darfur and later in southern Sudan, was marked by her providing medical care for women that physicians would usually do. That was because the physicians she worked with were Sudani men, and Muslim women did not want male doctors taking care of them.
Her time in Darfur featured helicopter rides to her work because roads were too dangerous to travel on.
"It was always disturbing to have to move out of the road when a UN tank convoy went by," she said, "or when a Janjaweed soldier offered a ride on his camel while nonchalantly fingering his AK-47. There was violence all around us, but never directed at us."
"It took weeks of red tape to get a visa, and work and travel permits to get into Darfur. I worked in a field hospital there helping the national midwives improve care. My travel permit expired too soon after I arrived so I was forced to leave again. They refused to renew my re-entry visa."
When all non-governmental organizations were kicked out of Darfur in March 2009, Carlton's Doctors Without Borders' team went to Aweil in the southern part of Sudan. "While there I got to help Dinka women birth their babies," she said. In her medical work so far Carlton has delivered more than 100 babies.
After her tour of service in Sudan ended, Carlton began serving as the nursing school director at the hospital in Gimbie. It is the sole survivor of several hospitals run by the Seventh-day Adventists in Ethiopia, the others being forced to close during the oppressive Communist regime. And though the Gimbie hospital survived, that word hardly describes its condition when Carlton arrived there from Sudan.
Gimbie Adventist Hospital is located on a hill at more than 6,000-feet elevation near Ethiopia's Gimbietown, population 100,000. There were precious few if any blankets or sheets at the hospital to cover admitted patients. No hospital gowns were available, so most patients went to bed in the sometimes grimy country clothes in which they arrived. Many of the hospital's patients were admitted for treatment of water-borne disease, yet the hospital's own, near primitive water system provided water that was little better than the polluted streams from which people regularly drank. The hospital's van, needed for frequent eight-to-11-hour trips to Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, to get supplies, was on its last legs, Carlton recalls.
Locals step up
When Upvalley Realtor Jeff Veness, a former fundraiser at Pacific Union College, read of Gimbie hospital's needs from a letter Becky had written to her parents in Angwin, he took the matter up with his Bible study class at the Pacific Union College Adventist Church.
"We can do something about this can't we?" Veness asked.
The class members promptly responded. Thousands of dollars flowed out to Carlton in Ethiopia to ease the hospital's shortage of blankets, sheets, gowns, blood pressure cups, thermometers, and other smaller needs.
"You should have seen the tears roll down the cheeks of the nurses when they saw that pile of clean, warm new blankets," Carlton wrote to Veness.
Then there was the need for a stand-by diesel generator for electricity for the hospital. "No problem," said Veness, "The class came through with enough green stuff again!"
And then there was the dangerous water quality problem: Angwinite Wes Lutz of Oakville Pump Service, already overseas doing humanitarian work, volunteered to design a system that would meet that need. Again, Veness's Bible study class found the cash to make that larger project happen.
Angwin construction volunteers Art Westphal and Bill Clark flew out to Ethiopia a few weeks ago to lead a team of Ethiopian laborers in constructing the new water filtration system.
Finally, using donations from people throughout Angwin, a new hospital supply vehicle has been purchased. "It has been taking loads of time to wade through all the red tape to get it cleared, but maybe by Christmas the new vehicle should be in service," Carlton said.
More is needed
But this is only the beginning.
"Thermometers and bed sheets are an ongoing need," she said. "But we'd sure like to put oxygen and suction by bedsides; the laundry needs a washing machine so we can do away with hand-washing; a new x-ray machine, and a new ultrasound would be a blessing.
"We talk about opening a new wing of the hospital since we are so often full past our capacity, but," she jokes, "that's a pretty big fish, and this is a land-locked country."
Veness's focus on Carlton's Ethiopian hospital is not Angwin's only tie to the African country. There is a group of some 25 Ethopians living in Angwin, all of whom still strongly focused on ways to help their poverty-ridden homeland.
Adu Worku, the group's leader, was an Ethiopian shepherd boy who escaped a dismal life when missionaries gave him a taste of education. Now the multi-degreed library director at Pacific Union College, he has strongly supported the Gimbie hospital projects among his Ethiopian expatriate friends.
On his own, Worku has raised funds and seen to the building of a school in Ethiopia. Only recently thousands of villagers attended the opening ceremonies of an enlargement of the school he and his friends have underwritten.
For her part, Becky Carlton's immediate future lies with the 30 Ethiopian nursing students she led in graduation ceremonies at Gimbie this past September; with the 32 nurses still in her training care, and a plan to admit 20 students to a diploma midwifery program soon. She wants to see them all through to giving the same kind of life saving service she has been giving to the world.
