By James Kokulo Fasuekoi|JNB Foundation Comm. Director

Photographs by author

Totota, Bong County-It was about October 2, when Hon. Jackson K. George Jr., made a brief stop at the Mary Horton Memorial Clinic in Totota, Bong County. The JNB Foundation’s boss was returning to Monrovia, having dropped off a huge consignment of medical equipment to Phebe Hospital in Gbarnga. As he toured the clinic’s maternity ward, he stumbled upon one old piece of medical instrument-it was a corroded child-delivery bed with bloodstains on its rails.

It turned out the piece of equipment, according to nurses working there, has been in service for more than a decade, probably as old as even 20 years or more. Clarena P. Fendor, the clinic’s Officer in Charge or “OIC,” as they refer to head nurses, has worked there for many years, and agrees. The “instrument,” she says, was “all” that they had, and there wasn’t any other way or option but to use what she said, “ was available.” The rusty bed now sits behind the facility, waiting to go down into history as a “medical relic” of the past.

“You can’t deliver the patient on the bare floor,” Fendor lamented, as she and her clinic’s staff as well as members of the visiting JNB Foundation team stared deeply at the bloodstained delivery bed when it was being dragged out of the hospital for the last time and taken to a dumpsite behind the clinic in October 2024. This is when staffers of President Joseph Nyuma Boakai Foundation headed by the charity’s Deputy Director Henry Flanpor worked to off-load a new child-delivery bed the charity presented to the clinic as a gift.

Witnessing the desperation and perhaps, angered by his own personal, and traumatic experience at the time of his birth, Hon. George, who has often spoken of his own premature birth, and how his own survival at the time largely depended on medical advances such as the use of an incubator, vowed he would replace the hospital’s corroded medical relic within a short time. In no time George’s promise came true: indeed, it took barely three days when his deputy executive director, Mr. Flanpor arrived at the clinic, popularly known as the “Totota Community Clinic”, and dropped off a new child-delivery bed, while his boss was on a business trip for the charity.

But that single delivery to the Totota Clinic would not be the last: for Hon. George, the best way to make Liberia’s major clinics and hospitals more efficient is to provide them with much needed tools as possible, something according to him, could help curtail under-performance, often seen at some health facilities. Hence, he prefers to give each facility “enough” of what it lacks, and move on to strengthen another, rather than give it “bits by bits,” thus leaving little or no impact at all. Because of such belief, Hon. George himself took a JNB-F Team back to Totota, last Wednesday (March 19), delivering a second maternity bed in less than six month to get this clinic to keep up with the heavy flow of patients.

This rural clinic, situated at the heart of the country, receives a fairly large number of patients daily, especially Mondays and Wednesdays-roughly about 200 patients a day, says OIC Fendor. Of the two hundred patients, about 98 to 100 are pregnant women who are seeking maternity care, according to her. The Kpelle Ethnic group occupies this section along the St. Paul River in Liberia and has one of the nation’s highest populations, according to the latest national census.

Moved by the JNB Foundation’s gifts last week, a group of pregnant Kpelle women, quickly left their maternity walls and came to the main entrance, moments after the JNB-F boss arrived with another new delivery bed for the facility; they heaped praises upon President Boakai Sr., and his charity for their fight to save lives in the region, and across the country. They spoke in their local Kpelle Language, exalting President Joseph Nyuma Boakai and prayed for more donations.