Hardt heads to Liberia to work with Ebola cases

While you are reading this, Peter and Carlene Hardt's daughter Joy will already be working in Liberia, West Africa. She is in charge of five nurses in a newly built 100-bed Ebola treatment center staffed by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a world-class disaster relief organization.

Her nurses are Liberian nationals who will be providing patient care and rehydration, monitoring patients, making notes for the physicians, providing food and bathing and helping the patients however they can. Joy will oversee their work, train and monitor them and their patients, as well as work in the "hot zone" herself with the patients.

You may recall that Joy has been a Navy nurse, and that prior to the Navy, she and others established a children's home in Kpando, Ghana for children orphaned by AIDS. The orphanage has since grown and has a tremendous reputation in the community. Since its founding, Joy has been able to go back to Ghana six times to visit and help.

Joy said, "As Ebola burns across West Africa the danger of it reaching Ghana remains ever present. We want to purchase basic personal protective equipment for the home, staff and sponsored families. We will be purchasing gloves, respirators, rubber boots and aprons, buckets, bleach, plastic sheeting and oral rehydration salts. All this equipment would be useful in any pandemic outbreak, not just Ebola."

She continued, "We want to have enough on hand to protect the children in the home, our staff, their families and those we sponsor in the community in the event the hospitals are overloaded, which has happened in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Our staff and older children are helping educate Kpando about Ebola and infection control methods."

She put in a final plug for fundraising by adding, "Donations made through GoFundMe (http://www.gofundme.com/hardthavenprepare) and our website, http://www.HardtHaven.org are tax deductible. If you donate through our website you can earmark it for our Ebola Preparedness Campaign on the donation page."

Luella Dow is a Cheney-area author. She can be reached at lotsaplots1@aol.com.