When Dr. Patrick Neustatter texted Nana Noi last year that the Lloyd F. Moss Free Clinic would have to close, Noi had an idea.
She asked Neustatter, the clinic’s medical director, if she could have the leftover medical supplies. Noi is the regional systems coordinator for the Rappahannock Emergency Medical Services Council, but her notion was a bit more … international.
Her daughter, Naomi, is working on her nursing degree in Ghana, and she tells her mother daily about the lack of resources there.
“It’s horrible,” Nana Noi recalled Friday.
The Moss board agreed to donate the supplies to Ghana, but Noi didn’t stop there.
Her original notion grew into what it is now: a full-blown humanitarian mission from the Fredericksburg area to West Africa in April.
Ten people are planning to go on the trip, and Noi said she is looking for others to join.
The cornerstone of the mission came from a talk Noi had with Kevin Dillard, president of the Rappahannock EMS Council. She told him it would be great to be able to take an ambulance to Africa.
So Dillard, president of LifeCare Medical Transports, was able to get the company to donate a fully equipped Type 2 ambulance that can be used in the region.
The ambulance will be deployed during the mission to Ghana and to Benin, where teams called Healing Envoys (clinical volunteers) and Hope Envoys (community educators) will deliver emergency care, public health education and community training.
In the meantime, Dillard said this week, the group has had to raise money to ship everything to Africa. It costs $7,000-$8,000 to ship an ambulance across the ocean, he said.
Once the equipment and volunteers, who are paying for their own travel, reach West Africa, they’ll assist residents of the area with stroke-recognition training, first aid and CPR education.
Community health education during the mission also will address maternal health, pediatric care and infectious-disease prevention. Hundreds of community members are expected to receive training in life-saving skills, which will allow them to continue assisting their neighbors after the mission team returns to Fredericksburg.
One focus will be road-safety instruction for Okada motorcycle taxi riders, one of West Africa’s highest-risk groups for preventable trauma.
“I’m not a motorcycle rider,” Dillard said, “but we’re going to teach motorcycle safety, and we’re going to try to buy a bunch of brand-new helmets, you know, a few hundred of them, and take the helmets and teach the people the importance of wearing a helmet and how to operate motorcycles safely.”
Press the Issue
Nana Noi is looking for more people to join her mission to West Africa.
Noi also enlisted the help of Pamela Bridgewater, a Fredericksburg native who has served as U.S. ambassador to Ghana, Benin and Jamaica.
Bridgewater is on the board of the Songhai International Centre in Benin, and she was able to work with Father Godfrey Nzamujo, Songhai’s founder, to schedule some of the medical supplies to be shipped to the region. Some supplies are going to a clinic at the Songhai Centre that is named for Bridgewater.
The materials are bound for Benin, but first they had to be sent to California. So Noi and Bridgewater initially shared that cost.
But they were later able to get some help from Bridgewater’s church, Shiloh Baptist (Old Site).
“And they were very, very generous to offset over half the cost of getting the materials to California,” Bridgewater said. These materials are being shipped separately from the ambulance and other supplies.
Missions such as Noi’s are particularly important, the former ambassador said, considering the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
The effort also marks a sort of silver lining to the Moss clinic’s closing.
“As I said,” Bridgewater said, “when I saw all of those materials, I could see the shelves of many of the clinics [in West Africa] that, you know, that struggle to get materials and supplies and masks and all to serve the populations there. And the Lord opened up a way for us, through a call from Nana to me and a call from me to Father [Nzamujo], and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Neustatter agreed. The Moss closing was a big blow, sure.
“But, yes, it’s nice to have something salvaged from it,” he said.
