Dr. Page and Dr. Erickson are once again both preparing for mission trips to Africa. This time, however, they will be traveling separately to different regions. As in the past, they will be operating on a very large number of blind patients from remote areas. Most of these patients travel very far distances and have never had any medical treatment their whole life.
Dr. Page writes the following about his upcoming trip:
“On April 12, 2012 we will embark on our mission to East Africa with a dozen team members from metro Detroit. Our trip begins on Thursday evening when we leave metro airport and fly at night across the Atlantic. When we arrive in Amsterdam we will join other members of our team from around the United States. After a layover of several hours in Amsterdam we take a 9 hour flight to Nairobi. We will arrive after dark in Nairobi and be greeted by our trusted drivers, Francis and Nelson. From the airport we will be taken to an early twentienth century missionary complex to spend the night. The following morning we will drive approximately six hours to the orphanage. It is a noticeably easier drive from when I first went when the roads were not paved and it took eight to nine hours. When we arrive at the orphanage we will be greeted by the children and they will perform traditional Luo and Massai dances. The next morning we will set up clinic with thousands of dollars of supplies that were donated by Alcon and Bausch and Lomb for surgery the next day. Over the course of the following three days we will have between 500 and 600 patients come through the clinic and we will operate on approximately 150 blind people.
On the fourth day we will leave for safari some where in the middle of Kenya. After two days of safari the team will travel back to Nairobi. From there, the majority of the team will leave for home.
I will be heading north to the newly formed country of South Sudan. With my friend, Steve James, CRNA, and Jacob Atem (PhD candidate) we will be traveling to Maar, Jonglei State, S. Sudan. It will entail a flight to the capital city of Juba via commercial airline and then small plane travel to an airstrip one hour’s drive away from Maar. It is here that our board of the Southern Sudan Health Care Organization has provided the necessary means to build a medical clinic. To say that we are trying to improve health care in the area would be misleading. There is no healthcare to improve upon. We are bringing the first supplies and western medicine to this area in the history of this region. A feasibility study had been performed some years ago demonstrating that we will be serving a population of approximately 26,000 within a 25 mile radius.
I have an idea of what I will see when I am there. I know from my missions to Kenya that when people don’t have access to doctors conditions progress to stages seldomly or never seen in the United States. We will do our best to provide some degree of relief for the people living there.”
