Best Laid Plans

This post is by Michael Were, Manager of OHI.

It’s funny how the best laid plans seem to get unstuck. This project has been in the planning for over 3 years. We sent a shipping container with lots of equipment about 12 months ago, however it didn’t contain absolutely everything that we needed.

One item not in the container was a small sterilising unit that cleans the surgical instruments after each operation. It’s not a big piece of equipment, about the size of a medium suitcase and weighs a little over 32 kilograms. How to get this to the Philippines?

In an effort to save some money, and avoid some excess baggage charges, I decided to drag good friend and videographer Laen Henry, on a Jetstar journey to the Philippines with me. So we set off 12 hours earlier that the rest of the team and headed via Darwin.

Problem is we are now here in Santiago City, the steriliser I think is still in Sydney! Somehow it didn’t make our Darwin flight. I would like to think I am a fairly placid and calm traveller, until its 1am in the morning and you have lost a critical piece of equipment!

We had no choice but to keep going on our connecting flight, in the hope that steriliser will somehow catch up to us. Overnight in Manila gave me a little time to calm down, only to be confronted with a cancelled flight from Manila to our project site in Santiago!

A few rapid hours of frantic phone calls, taxi rides to the airport and replacement tickets and I can finally say we have arrived! We are all intact, mildly stressed, excited but still looking for our steriliser.