Dear Editor,
I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the generous donors of maternal and newborn medical equipment for Kenema Government Hospital located in Sierra Leone.
Sierra Leone has one of the highest rates of maternal and neonatal mortality in the world and I have been working here as a midwife and educator since July. My job is to increase the midwifery workforce through high quality education, as well as working with the hospital midwives to improve competency and delivery of care. However, this project is difficult and challenging due to the straight forward lack of basic equipment to provide adequate care. We are talking BP cuffs, stethoscopes, thermometers, gloves, medications, resuscitation bags, fetoscopes and dopplers among, well, just about everything else.
Special thanks to Janet Bowen, Brian Burns, Jackie Forster, Beth Graber, Kim Greer, Paulie Hall, Angela Hinnegan, Julie McCarron and Marilyn Shroyer. Special thanks to Joelle Burdick for taking the time to gather outdated equipment from SPH, and to Kim Greer and Julie McCarron for leading this campaign. Be assured that everything will be put to good and immediate use to care for this vulnerable population of women, babies and families.
With gratitude,
Dana Whittaker, CNM
Kenema, Sierra Leone
Ukraine war threat to world
I voted for Trump. Here’s why: He’s a master deal-maker. His other numerous personal flaws are irrelevant. If anyone can end the Ukrainian war, he can. The transfer of Ukrainian land to Russia for peace is of small consequence to the world. Same with the moral principle of resisting forceful aggression with countering defensive force. Righteousness is an obsolete and dangerous concept in a confrontation between nuclear-armed countries. A nuclear free-for-all will immolate much of humanity; those left will starve to death. This Ukrainian war, with its tit-for-tat escalations (North Korean troops; Ukraine deep-strikes using U.S. missiles; Russian use of a nuclear-capable ballistic missile) has progressively dismantled many of the taboos and rational safeguards against use of nuclear weapons. For Putin to feel compelled to even threaten their use is a form of blasphemy.
We are perilously close to the next level of escalation, which is affixing a tactical nuclear warhead to those Russian missiles. Such use would cross the last-ditch threshold of MAD (mutually assured destruction) and compel irrational and hysterical reactions from our civilian and military leaders. In that fearful atmosphere, accidental launches from misreading the opponent’s intent are inevitable. And there goes the neighborhood! The situation is uncannily similar to WWI’s prelude, that lovely autumn following the beautiful European summer of 1914, when the misunderstandings, misjudgments, ambitions and fears between the participating national leaders snowballed rapidly into an appalling disaster. In this case substitute Ukraine for Serbia as the tinderbox, and compress the four years of that bloody war into mere hours of terror and horror.
This war absolutely must end soon, followed by some form of consensus for restraining future nuclear confrontation, anything but the current MADness.
Larry Slone
Homer
Looking for help on book printer
HELP! I am hoping someone reading this knows the name of the printer that Jan O’Meara used in printing the book that Beth Cummings compiled from over 50 local families, of their stories settling in the Homer area. The book is called “And Some Stayed On.” When I asked Jan, she could not remember, and I asked our treasurer, who assured me Jan had ordered the books and POPs wrote a check to her to repay her. No record that we can find, nowhere in the book, and the museum would like more copies to sell.
It has been a most popular book. If you know who the printer is, please call me at 907-235-6652.
Thanks so much for your help.
Milli Martin, president
Patrons of the Pratt, Inc.
