Development Projects Romania, 2006

The Urgenta crew left for Sibiu, Romania on Wednesday April 19th. It's a trip of 1975 km. through Germany, Austria and Hungary. We arrived on Thursday in the afternoon and we were welcomed by employees of the Children's Hospital. We soon found out the truck was off-loaded on Tuesday, which we were a bit reluctant about due to negative experiences in the past. Fortunately, Alina Cozac assured us everything was stored in safe storage rooms.

Friday, the technicians started with the installation of the medical gassses outlets (oxygen and compressed air) in the delivery rooms of the Obstetrics Department at the University Hospital. It was a strange experience for us as men: you're working amongst pregnant women who are lying in bed or walking in the corridors, waiting for sufficient dilation. When that occurs, they are rushed to one of the delivery rooms and within 10 minutes, after a lot of moaning and heavy breathing, the baby is born.
We made an arrangement with the employees to make sure there was one delivery room available at all times. It took us the whole day and a good part of Saturday to complete the work.

On Tuesday (it was Orthodox Eastern weekend including Monday), we spend the day on checking all supplies and goods against the donation list. This is time-consuming work because every little item has to be checked and counted.

We started with our work at the Isolation Pavilion on Wednesday. We fitted 12 compressed air and 12 oxygen wall panels. We were a bit unlucky: the number of admitted babies was higher than usual. This forced us to divide the work into 2 phases. Firstly, all baby's were brought to one side of the building so we could install the outlets at the other side and vice versa. Saturday afternoon it was finished and in the future a lot of babies will have less problems with respiration difficulties. What a difference such a small improvement can make in providing better care to these babies!

After the weekend, we continued our work at the main building of the Children's Hospital. We started with expanding the compressed air network to the second and third floor. That meant drilling through 80 cm. thick floors which wasn't an easy job but we succeeded and we even managed to fit one room with outlets.

Tuesday, we moved to the Luther Children's Hospital located at the boulevard of Sibiu. The hospital plans to rebuild it into a fully functioning First Aid Outpatient Clinic. We were asked to take care of the medical gasses systems in advance. Three rooms were fitted within a day.

We used Wednesday to check our truck and to see what materials, tools and equipment we should bring the next time we're in Romania.

We had a meeting with mr. Mihut, Econmical Director of the Children's Hospital about possible new fresh-water cellars. We had brought some information from home about these kind of systems. The hospital will ask a local contractor for a calculation. The goal is three cellars which will cost a lot of money. The Urgenta Foundation will do anything possible to raise funds for this project.
The hospital also plans to modernize the electrical systems. The fuse boxes are technically outdated and in some cases plain hazardous. The hospital will draw up initial plans and send it to us.

In the afternoon we went to the Children's Aids Home II to deliver 2 oxygen concentrators. This equipment was sponsored by Vivisol.

Thursday May 4th, we went back to the Netherlands. We think it was a successful mission and we would like to thank all sponsors who made these projects possible. We would also like to thank all employees who helped us during our stay in Romania.