Hôpital Baptiste Biblique is expanding and updating

by Stanley LearyPhotography

Women cook for their family members who are patients at Hôpital Baptiste Biblique, located in Tsiko, Togo, West Africa.
[NIKON Z 6, Sigma 24.0-105.0 mm f/4.0, Mode = Aperture Priority, ISO 5000, 1/200, ƒ/4, (35mm = 52)]

I went to West Africa to help tell the story of Hôpital Baptiste Biblique, located in Tsiko, Togo. Built in 1985, they are in desperate need of infrastructure upgrades and need expansion. Today I want to share what they have to develop for the patients and families.

You see, there is no hotel in the area or restaurants. When patients come to the hospital, they need a place to stay, cook and take care of their family members.

When you go to the Hospital here, you get your mother’s cooking or a relative’s cooking because the hospital takes care of the medical care, and the family takes care of laundry, food, and things like bathing the patient.

The first thing that they are doing is adding more space for the patients and their families by creating a hotel with traditional outside kitchens.

This is the original hotel/kitchen space at Hôpital Baptiste Biblique. They didn’t do an excellent job of planning to take in how the families cook outside when building in 1985. [NIKON Z 6, Sigma 24.0-105.0 mm f/4.0, Mode = Manual, ISO 8000, 1/125, ƒ/4, (35mm = 32)]
Workers building the outside kitchen for the new hotel space at Hôpital Baptiste Biblique [NIKON D5, Nikon 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8, Mode = Aperture Priority, ISO 2000, 1/8000, ƒ/5, (35mm = 14)]

They first build four new hotel wings in their renewal and expansion project. They had to do a better job of taking care of the community and putting them first.

The 1985 building is just one giant room. No privacy. No outside kitchen area.
They have even built a version that allows for private rooms for those who want to pay for the ability to lock the door. All the rooms also now have electricity.

Besides adding hotel rooms, they have had to build sewage and an electrical system. They cannot tie into the existing grids because they don’t exist for sewage, and running a hospital where the town’s power goes out almost daily isn’t realistic. They have a generator and system that kicks in when the local power goes out.

When I was there, it went out 2 to 3 times a day, and the generator kicked on after 7 seconds.

It won’t be long before the patients move from this older hotel to the new, improved version.

Here is a link if you want to help support the hospital as they upgrade and expand to meet Togo’s physical and spiritual needs.