Israeli surgeons perform life-saving procedure for Ethiopian girl during power outage
A group of Israeli doctors recently performed a successful head-and-neck life-saving surgery on a 3-year-old girl in Ethiopia in the middle of a power outage.
Dr. Yotam Shkedy of Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, who led the Israeli medical delegation to Ethiopia, explained that power outages are common in developing countries.
"Power outages are a fact of life in these countries," said Shkedy, "but we are used to continuing to receive the power supply from the backup systems. In this case, it didn’t happen, and we had to improvise quickly because the little girl was lying on the operating room bed in the middle of the procedure.”
However, he admitted he did not expect to perform the procedure in an operating room without power and needed to improvise.
When the power went out, the team used their mobile phones to provide enough light to perform the procedure. The electric ventilator reportedly also stopped working, so the team was forced to pump air into the toddler’s nose manually until the power turned back on.
“There are many thoughts about working conditions in third-world countries when going on such missions, Shkedy noted, “but working in an operating room with no power at all never crossed my mind. Happily, we made sure that our patient’s life was not in danger as a result of the malfunction, and we finished the job properly.”
The volunteer medical team treated dozens of local patients during their stay in the capital city, Addis Ababa.
Despite its tiny size, the Jewish state plays a disproportionate role in providing humanitarian aid around the world, particularly in many African nations.
Israel has a special relationship with Ethiopia as tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews have immigrated to Israel over the years. In June 2022, some 160 Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel on a special flight sponsored by Christian Zionists. The airlift was part of a larger effort, Operation Zur Israel, which has brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to the State of Israel over the last decade.
Since the 1980s, over 95,000 Ethiopian Jews have immigrated to Israel, with the Ethiopian community in Israel numbering more than 140,000.
The All Israel News Staff is a team of journalists in Israel.
