We are certainly thankful to the Lord and to all those who pray for us regularly, as well as to all those who have supported the clinic project financially or through coming to work on this project! On Thursday, the day that Linda finally received her identity card, we also received the "Autorizatie de Functionare" (authorization to function) from Sanepid!! Then Milt and Dragos went to the Colegiul Medicilor (the College of Doctors) with copies of both of our identity cards as well as a lot of other documents to start the last 2 steps to get approval for us to work in our clinic. When they got there, the secretary said, "Why are you here? You are founding members of the Foundation. You don't need any more approvals. You have the right to practice in your clinic now." After a lot of very rapid and animated discussion between Dr. Oprea (the director) and Dragos (such as, "Why were we told the exact opposite last month?"), they all agreed that we indeed don't need to do any more bureaucratic steps in order to be able to open the clinic!!
So now there are just a few more practical details before we can open the clinic. Our first nurse and social worker and perhaps the receptionist will be starting work on Wednesday, 5/15. We will spend a considerable amount of time training them, helping them to understand our expectations and a more Western approach to patient care. We also have to buy a certain type of cash register and register it with the local government financial office. We have waited for over 9 months for the building to be registered as having been built, called "intabulare". Our lawyer informed us that the judge finally approved this on Friday. Without this "intabulare" we were unable to buy the special cash register or any other financial forms that are necessary to function, like receipts or invoices. In other words, we would be able to practice medicine but our clinic would not be able to be open for business. So, this last week was a gift from God, more than just a successful week!!
We also hope to finish the parking lot before opening. We requested bids from 3 different companies. The first two were very high, about $24,000, and the third one, which we received on Friday, was for about $14,000. Thanks to the generous support of several people last month, we have enough funds to do this now, as well as to pay next month's salaries! The contractor said he could put the sidewalk in first, so that people can get to the clinic for medical care even before the parking lot is finished. Especially old people would have a difficult time walking on the rock that is there now.
Yesterday, Saturday, Stan and Roberta Jones helped us plant a weeping willow tree in the garden area in front of the clinic, as well as some beautiful petunias. Stan and Roberta are volunteers with CIPE, the Center for Private Enterprise, here. We met them when they were here as volunteers 18 months ago, and then Milt spoke at their Navy Chapel on Oahu, Hawaii, last March. Stan conducted the service and gave the sermon at BEL Fellowship today. Last Thursday, Roberta and Linda went to a garden store and found the tree! It's about 15 feet tall, and the workers at the store tied it to the outside of our car with rope made of Saran Wrap! It was amazing the looks we received on the way home. One man in a truck behind us even came up to us at a stop light and said he had a large ficus tree at home, if we were interested in buying it!
The other great news is that Ruxi and Dragos have a nice healthy baby boy, Eduard! He was born May 1, at about 1 a.m. Ruxi and Dragos are both exhausted. Eduard doesn't sleep a lot. But he sure is cute!
One project that we thought that we would be involved in, but won't be able to, is helping the International Mission Board of the Baptist Church receive donated medicines for their short term medical teams. Milt and the Team Coordinator for the IMB went to the Ministry of Health and they were told that there is a new regulation being applied that requires any receiving charitable organization to have a pharmacist on staff. Our organization is just too small to hire a pharmacist, at least for now. We hope that sometime in the future we will be able to have a pharmacy to help our patients, but that's a whole separate bureaucracy that we haven't begun to deal with yet.
We also want to thank the people who generously made donations toward Ionut's leukemia medicines. He has been doing very well, but Thursday night his mother called and told us he was in the hospital with mumps and was very sick. (They don't immunize for mumps here.) We haven't received an update from her yet (she has no phone, so we can't call her). Please pray for his recovery!
We again wish to thank you all for your prayers and your financial support. They sustain us and lift us up and open doors for us, through the Lord's intervention! We are behind on our personal thank-you notes, but want you to know that we are very thankful and that we will write. We know we need to get caught up before the clinic opens!