As I have related in previous posts, Friday is often the busiest day of the week. Last Friday night I was congratulating myself on a relatively peaceful day.

The earlier part of the week had been rough. Government inspection, a fight in the laundry, an intense four hour general staff meeting. The hospital is full, the community is satisfied with the care we give, and we are marginally in the black, but there is no way that salaries can keep up with the spiraling cost of living. It is hard for staff to be happy when they are hungry.

For the sake of the censors who will read this post before you do, I will indulge in a short story that of course has nothing to do with the hospital. Once upon a time there was a bakery. It was the only bakery in town and everyone came there to buy bread. The bread was good, and the people were happy. Then new bakeries came to town. At least they were called bakeries. But they didn’t bake much bread. And what they did bake tasted bad. So the people kept coming to the old bakery, which still baked good bread. But the bakers at the new “bakeries” got paid lots of money—money that came from other towns, not money that came from the sale of bread. These bakers were happy because they did not have to work much since nobody really wanted their bread. But the bakers at the old bakery were sad. They knew that they were better bakers than the bakers at the new bakeries. They knew that their bread tasted better. They knew that the people love their bread best. And they were always busy baking bread, sometimes all night long. The trouble was that they did not get paid as much as the bakers at the new bakeries, because the old bakery only got money from selling bread. The manager of the bakery was always thinking of ways to make the bakers feel special, but it was hard because he didn’t have much to work with.

Anyway, last Friday night I was baking pizza with Petra, Renee, and Becky. It was Becky’s birthday. Some kind soul mailed us a jar of green olives stuffed with garlic. These were the centerpiece of a fine smelling pizza that was about ready to come out of the oven. We had just opened the Sabbath.

Then someone pounded on the front door. A young girl seemed to have acute appendicitis. Our surgeon was in Addis getting his license renewed. Our GPs and ob/gyn refused to operate—with good reason. Anyone who operates without a license for surgery gets a free stay behind bars.

A couple years back the great Erling J Oksenholt in cooperation with Bob Barden facilitated the donation of a Ford ambulance to Gimbie Adventist Hospital. Most of the roads around Gimbie are too rough for the ambulance and few patients have the money to cover the cost of fuel for its thirsty V-8, but there are times when the ambulance is simply invaluable. Friday night was one of those times.

I ran out my front door, grabbed the keys from Mark (who was overseeing an evangelistic campaign in the hospital auditorium) put the girl and her family in the back of the ambulance, got Ellen (a visiting EMT) and Beniam to ride shotgun, said a prayer for safety and tore off into the night.

The lights and siren parted the crowds of Gimbie like Moses rod and the red sea. The guards at the Gimbie checkpoint respectfully raised the barrier and we were on our way to the government hospital in Nekempte.

Most of my driving time in Ethiopia has been behind the wheel of the hospital’s land cruiser. The land cruiser has many admirable qualities, most of them only apparent off road, but it is not particularly powerful, corners poorly, and becomes highly unstable above 60 mph.

The ambulance may be ill suited to rough roads, but it is very stable, and at least in comparison with the land cruiser, it goes like a bullet out of a gun. I know my mom and Bob Barden will read this, so I won’t say exactly how fast I drove or how long it took us to reach Nekempte. Suffice it to say that little time was wasted.

About 40k from Nekempte it started raining hard. It felt like a hundred fire hoses were aimed at the ambulance. I had to keep the window down to keep the windshield clear. I was soaked in seconds. The rain stopped quickly and steam rose in clouds from the warm asphalt. This made it tough to see the road surface.

The road between Gimbie and Nekempte crosses a number of rivers and creeks. At one of the smaller bridges a foot of water was flowing over the road. We plowed right in at a decent clip. Ellen screamed. I kept the wheel straight and avoided the gas and break. Water shot onto the windshield and over the top of the ambulance. A few tense seconds later we were on the other side.

The end of the trip was anticlimactic. We pulled into the Nekempte hospital, had the girl out of the ambulance on the stretcher almost before the ambulance stopped moving, and then waited for the surgeon to show up. And waited for the surgeon to show up, and, well, you get the picture. We left before the surgeon arrived. The girl’s father is a well connected dude. If there was a surgeon in within cell phone range of Nekempte that night, he was called in.

The drive back to Gimbie was peaceful. The people in the roadside villages had gone to bed. We saw several hyena, Ethiopian deer, some dik dik, mongoose, and a beautiful owl. Ellen and Beniam dozed and I thought about the story of the bakery.

Even if times are tough at the old bakery, at least the bakers and their manager can take comfort in the quality of their bread and the quantity of bread that they provide to the community. I don’t know the end of the story. Part of that may be up to you. But I do hope that someday soon when the Master Chef will call us skyward, the poor workers at the old bakery will get a special reward.