 Good morning Hickets Tuesday. Working with Partners in Health, our community is now on pace to raise over $35 million in the first five years of our project to help P I H radically reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. This video comes in four parts. What happened, what's happening, why it's happening, and what's next. So three years ago, our community began working with Partners in Health to support their efforts to strengthen the health care system in Sierra Leone's Kono district, which is the epicenter of the global maternal mortality crisis. Like in 2019, one in 17 women in Sierra Leone could expect to die in pregnancy or childbirth. So to address this crisis, P I H and the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health wanted to build a world-class maternal and infant care wing of Koi Du government hospital called the Maternal Center of Excellence. The MCOE would not only have a blood bank and surgical suites to make emergency C-sections safe, but would also serve as a teaching hospital to train the next generation of Sierra Leonean nurses, midwives, and doctors. So in 2019, we committed to help P I H raise $25 million over five years so they could break ground on this hospital expansion. We weren't sure how we were going to raise the money, but never underestimate Nerdfighteria. So where are we now? Well, despite supply chain challenges, the Maternal Center of Excellence has begun construction, although it is a long way from finished, but we don't need to wait for a building to start to see the change. Koi Du government hospital is already becoming a teaching hospital. The first cohort of nurses and midwives recently finished their rotations there, and this is really exciting because it means more people in the region can pursue those careers. Also, because we have blown past our initial goal, we've been able to expand this project to extend our support to several primary health care clinics in the region, including one in the town of Kaima. And Kaima was the scene of a really important story this year, I think, which is that there was a huge outbreak of a diarrheal illness in town, and that's one of the leading causes of death for kids under the age of five. And in response, the clinic treated people who got sick, but also recognized that there was an underlying cause to this outbreak, which is that neither the clinic nor the community had regular access to clean water. And so the PIH team drilled a well that now provides clean water not just to the clinic, but also to the town. I think this is part of what makes PIH so special. They respond to acute health crises, but also to the chronic underlying causes of those crises. And this approach is working in Kono. Child mortality at the hospital has fallen by over half just in the last two years. Unsexy but critical system stuff like efficient warehousing and climate controlled storage of medication has improved the availability of everything from medicines to surgical gloves. And maternal mortality is declining as well, even though it is still hundreds of times too high. I think it's really important to note that this is not happening because progress is like inevitable. If we've learned anything from the last two and a half years, it's that progress is never inevitable. This is happening because of the extraordinary commitment of Sierra Leone's healthcare workers and because of your support. Like thousands of people donate monthly to this project at pih.org slash hank and john, thousands more have made one-time gifts and around 100 nerdfighters have come together to donate between $2,000 and $100,000 a year to ensure that every one of those dollars gets matched. You can get a full financial breakdown of where we are at the unlisted video in the doobly-doo. Should I call it the video info if I'm wearing a suit? Probably so. The video info below. But the other really important source of revenue for this project is socks and coffee. Oh, which reminds me. Starting today, we have a light roast available from the Awesome Coffee Club and it's great, amazing coffee sent to your house and 100% of the profits go to charity. We named our roasts after butterflies that live in Sierra Leone, like our classic medium dark roast is called Octavia after Precious Octavia, a butterfly that changes color depending on when it's born. And our brand new light roast is called Calypso after this ethereal beauty Belinois Calypso. So now, whether you're a fancy coffee person who likes light roasts or regular coffee person, we've got you covered. AwesomeCoffeeClub.com. All that said, by far the most efficient way to donate to this project is pih.org slash Hank and John. It's just that if you're gonna get socks and coffee anyway and you are, why not do it for charity? So what's next? Well, for me at least this is the biggest news. Pih has a long history of fighting for justice and equity in healthcare when the global health community said it was impossible to treat multi drug resistant tuberculosis in poor communities. Pih proved otherwise. They also helped lead the charge to expand access to antiretroviral therapy for people living with HIV. And our biggest hope when we started this project is that even though our work would be focused in just one region of just one country, we could use that example to prove that it is possible to radically reduce maternal and child mortality everywhere. And then maybe the progress in Kona would help inspire other partners to expand the work. And we're starting to see that. Pih is now working with Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health and the World Bank to strengthen the health care system in the Kailun district, which is just south of Kona. As Pih is, John Lasher recently wrote me, you and your community, which now feels very much like our shared community, have paved the way for more partners to join us and for us to expand our work. And there is so much left to do. And there is so much left to do like one of the big challenges here is that as a health care system gets stronger, more people begin to trust it and more people begin to use it. Like in 2019, the primary health care center in the town of Suwaffe saw 4,700 visits and in 2020, it saw 4,700 visits. So like from the outside, one might conclude that the clinic isn't very important to the community or that it doesn't serve a very large patient population. But because over 95% of Pih Sierra Leone's employees are Sierra Leonean and live in the communities where they work, they understood that something else was happening, which is that the clinic did not have the staff, space, stuff, and systems to provide good care. And in 2021, after Pih started supporting the facility, the clinic in Suwaffe saw over 20,000 patients, a 500% increase over the year before. And as the clinic continues to get stronger, it may see even more patients. So this is a really critical time for our work with partners in health because patient volume is increasing so dramatically and we are hoping that our support will increase too. Needing an emergency C-section in Kono continues to be a life-threatening emergency, but we know it can change. We know it can change because when we started this project three years ago, one in 17 women in Sierra Leone could expect to die in pregnancy or childbirth. Today, it's fewer than one in 20. That is still much too high, but that progress is real. We can choose to share a world where maternal and child deaths are rare. And thanks to your attention and support, I really believe that our community is helping to bring about such a world. Even if you can't personally donate, your attention and advocacy helps draw attention to the global maternal and child mortality crises, which brings in big funding partners. If you can donate, the link is pih.org slash Hank and John. Nerdfighteria, I continue to be astonished by you. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.