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By Hadi Fornaji.
Tunis, 13 September 2016:
A local fundraising group has been set up to find the money to complete Misrata Central Hospital which remains unfinished nine years after work first started.
The hospital is 80-percent complete, but significant gaps in the work mean that only the emergency and surgery units are fully functioning. The maternity unit, for example, is having to use private rented accommodation some distance away from the hospital.
While the shells of most of the buildings are complete, a broad spread of work still needs to be done, said Taher Zaroog, one of those involved in the fundraising. Roads need to completed and windows, air conditioning, beds and equipment installed. Several hundred beds too needed to be acquired. The haematology laboratory also needs to be equipped, as do the pathology, radiology and immunology departments as well as the hospital kitchen. A pharmacy also needs to be installed.
Work on the hospital stopped with the revolution, but although there have been regular promises over the past year that it would be restarted, they have remained just promises, Zaroog explained.
“Those getting involved as civilian volunteers,” he added, and they included “a number of young people who are eager to do anything they can to help Misrata and help the hospital”.
As yet, no one is in charge. “We formed small committees, one for collecting funds, another for the media and yet another for connecting officials”. The committees are not limited to small tight knit group of activists, he noted. “Anyone can join.”
A parade in support of the fundraising group was organised last Friday. Other fundraising efforts are in the pipeline.
