PRI Examines Challenges of Hospital's Charitable Legacy in Gabon

PRI's "The World" profiles Gabon's Albert Schweitzer Hospital, which "is struggling to achieve the goals of its founder while adapting to a new century and a different Africa." The story recaps the hospital's history and its board's recent efforts to address what one board member described as locals' "dependency" on historically European directors. However, Lachlan Forrow, a doctor at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the only American on the hospital's board, recently became president of the board, and he has worked to establish "a new relationship between locals and outsiders -- blacks and whites," PRI reports. Forrow "found an experienced Gabonese hospital administrator -- Antoine Nziengui --" who is now the Schweitzer Hospital director, an African "for the first time since the hospital was founded 99 years ago," the news service writes, adding that the hospital "still faces huge obstacles: a million-dollar budget deficit, antiquated facilities, a rising burden of HIV and tuberculosis" (Baron, 5/17).