The Nurses Heart to Heart team arrived in Iraq over the weekend (after over 26 hours of travel) and made it past the largest hurdle of this trip: getting 100lbs of prescription and over-the-counter medications cleared to bring through airport security.
As you may remember, the Bajed Kandala II internally displaced persons camp's small health clinic cares for the residents of both Bajed Kandala I and Bajed Kandala II IDP camps. That's 8,000 people.
This health clinic has been unfunded and unable to restock their pharmacy for months now, so a huge part of our trip is the delivery of these much-needed medications.
NHTH worked with the local healthcare providers to get a list of exactly what they wanted. While it is a time-consuming process to order all of the medications, it is relatively simple; the real challenge is getting the approvals to bring the meds into the country.
For this particular trip, it had been a multi-month back-and-forth to get the appropriate paperwork and approvals to bring the medications into Kurdistan and there were concerns that the approvals might not come.
Thankfully, our local counterparts kept working on the problem and we got news right before we left: the airport security officers had been contacted and if there was any trouble, we were to call the doctor in Iraq that approved the medications. So we proceeded as planned and, after a slightly nerve-wracking conversation with the airport security officer, we were cleared to leave the airport with our medications! We are so grateful!
We will be delivering these medications in a couple of days. In the meantime, the NHTH team has been in meetings with local healthcare education leaders and healthcare providers to discuss their needs and how we can help.
Our next "stop" is two days of teaching in Erbil. Thanks for following along on this trip—we'll report back soon!
