A few weeks ago we got a call from the EMI South Africa office that they looking for a civil engineer to join them on a project trip to Gutu, Zimbabwe to serve EMAS - Canada in a site assessment and conceptual design of the Gutu Mission Hospital.
EMAS (Education, Medical Aid and Service) - Canada is a movement of Christ-centred healthcare teams proclaiming God’s love to all the world through healing and teaching. The project team included the executive director of EMAS, a medical doctor with EMAS, three architects from Australia and Zimbabwe, a mechanical engineer from the US, and the team from South Africa (planners, project leads, and a nurse).
This was a short notice trip for me with my logistics being ironed out just days before leaving. While Gutu is only about 2,000 km from Uganda (about half the distance across the US), it took almost 26 hrs of travel to get there. I left at midnight for my 2am flight from Entebbe-> Addis Ababa -> Lusaka, Zambia -> Harare, Zimbabwe (landing around 2:30 pm the next day) before an 8.5 hr car ride through Zimbabwe’s pothole ridden highways to arrive at our accommodation at about 1:30am.
We took off bright and early the next day for meetings and a tour around the mission and hospital grounds. This site was interesting and we noticed many creative engineering systems and site challenges:
- The hospital was literally built on a rock (no underground utilities).
- Water was scarce: there were almost 600 people being served off one 6” bore hole well drilled in the early 90s (maximum supply of 17,000L per day)
- Only one building had operating internal plumbing
- Municipal power only comes in varying amounts between 11pm and 4am.
And yet there was such a hope and a joy in everyone we met at the hospital and nursing school. There was a desire to give everything they had to their patients and to provide the best care they can to those who seek help at the hospital despite the limited resources and infrastructure. They are a group of resilient people and were so welcoming to our whole team.
The rest of the week, the project co-leader and I walked around with a guy named Tatenda who seemed to wear a dozen different hats around the hospital. He pretty much organized and coordinated our whole visit and knew everything on the campus from the plumbing specs to the hospital budget and operating protocols. He was amazing and answered a billion of our questions.
We split into two teams based on the project deliverables - the assessment team and the vision team. The assessment team was onsite most days and was looking at the existing infrastructure. We created as-built site plans, service maps, and performed conditions assessment on all of the existing infrastructure and systems on the campus. The vision team worked closely with the hospital leadership creating a game plan of future hospital infrastructure updates and a schematic design for a new maternity center. At the end of the project trip we presented our preliminary work and assessments to the hospital board.
EMI project trips are pretty awesome. I feel biased in saying that, but they’re a good mix of work, fun and spiritual development. We have devotionals every morning and have a chance to hear everyone’s story and testimonies but we also take the last day of the trip to be tourists and go do fun stuff in whatever country we’re in.
Our last day in Zim we went to Imire Conservancy for a safari drive and spent the night at Bushman’s Rock safari lodge…but not without a complete adventure on the way (Click here if you’d like to read that story!). We had a closing time with the team before heading to the airport in the morning. It was pretty smooth through the airport (a relief after the complication of flying out of Entebbe) and I had a much better flight itinerary on the way home, getting in around 1am.
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