"Breathing for Life" Rotary International project

Obse Lubo is an active member of the Castro Valley Rotary Club and a registered nurse at Stanford Medical Center.  She was born and raised in the very small city of Nejo. Her passion for nursing emanates from lived experiences growing up in a place where death due to preventable and treatable infectious diseases is common. She is now using my medical training to give back to my home city and country.

Since July of 2009, She has traveled to Nejo once a year with a group of volunteer doctors and nurses from California to provide basic healthcare to the community in need. Nejo Hospital is the only hospital that serves over 500,000 patients in that area, with limited resources and supplies. On those trips, the medical team has saved lives of many women and children who are suffering from various illnesses. They have changed the lives of countless villagers for good by providing community education and disease prevention.

During the 2013 Medical mission trip to Nejo, Ethiopia, she witnessed a doctor at Nejo Hospital have to decide who would get to be on oxygen to save one life: a six-year-old boy with an asthma attack who needed to be on continuous oxygen, or a 50+years-old man who came in due to an accident and needed emergency surgery. The doctor chose the accident victim, and the little boy died a few hours later due to a lack of oxygen to his lungs and brain. Her life goal at that moment became the elimination of these choices by obtaining a reliable oxygen generator for the hospital. 

Currently, her Rotary club is working on a global grant project for the fiscal year of 2016-2017 to buy the oxygen generator for Nejo Hospital so the hospital could have a continuous oxygen supply for its patients. The Rotary Club of Finot in Addis Ababa will be the host club in Ethiopia for this project and Castro Valley Rotary club will be the international partner. Our estimated budget is about $184,000.

Obse and the Castro Valley Rotary Club are asking all the clubs in our area to get involved in this life-saving project by allocating DDF/Global Grants toward this project. They have been in contact with Bob Pagett (member of Scotts Valley Rotary club) of Assist International to help us in search of the oxygen generator. In support of this project seven Rotarians from three Rotary clubs are working tirelessly as a project/grant planning committee: Joe Hamilton, Dwight Perry, Jeboy Koshy, Dr. Heidi Hausauer (Current Area 2 Assistant Governor), Bob Shayler, Cliff Sherwood, Bill Nott, our current president Kern Lewis and president elect Carol Wikle.

A grant or a fund of any amount from a club will help us tremendously toward achieving our goal. We have opened a grant application and here is our grant number on RI website: GG1528367