From start to finish, it took just less than a month for Christian Hospital Chandraghona (CHC) in the south east of Bangladesh to compile and complete their site, which includes 11 main sections and numerous sub-sections, as well as a comprehensive photo gallery.
Dr Stephen Chowdhury, CHC Medical Director, (pictured below) is delighted with the website.
“It has been my dream for some time that we would be able to share our activities and results with the wider world but we have never had the time, resource or expertise to do this,” he says.
“If CHC is to survive in the future, we have to be able to demonstrate more widely what we are doing and encourage as many people as possible to support this work, which is the main source of healthcare to the tribal populations in the extremely poor areas we serve”.
“We hope that the website will be a comprehensive showcase of our current and future planned activities, and pay tribute to the dedication of those who served CHC during the first 100 years”.
Team effort
Stephen says the end result was achieved through hard work, which involved long, 12-hour days. “The production was a real team effort in a very short time! We started from nothing at the beginning of November.
“We were lucky that Dr Evelyn Dykes came back from the UK at that time. Evelyn is a paediatric surgeon who had visited us before as a member of a BMS Medical Team and this time was able to spend longer at CHC.”
Evelyn and Stephen planned the pages, the content and the links before Evelyn typed up all the information provided by different members of CHC’s senior team.
Stephen adds, “We also had a visit from some old BMS friends, who were roped in to helping us. Bob and Mary Hart contributed to an important historical narrative, whilst Bryan and Margaret Whitty gave their comments, as did Chris Rigg and Karen Busby who came with the BMS Medical Team in late November.”
“Former missionary Marjorie McVicar who wrote the historical record of CHC, Stepping Stones of Faith, allowed us to include that in our publications access page.”
Energy Evelyn Dykes (pictured left) says she is proud of what the team achieved.
“I still can’t believe we did it in such a short time – I had to check online when I came home to make sure it really existed! Miracles really do happen at CHC!” she says.
“It has been very gratifying to hear and read so many positive comments about the site – especially when most people assume that there must have been a lot of people, money, expertise and time behind it!
“It just shows how much can be achieved when a small number of people dedicate their time and energy to something they believe in – which is of course exactly what CHC does all the time.”
Evelyn adds that the challenge now is to keep the site updated and hopes it will inspire people to contribute their support, “especially those with the skills to enable CHC to continue moving forward in this new era of global communication and technology”.
The website is just one way in which CHC is embracing new technology. “The internet has changed the way we work,” says Stephen Chowdhury. “It makes new medical information more accessible to our staff and allows much more rapid communication with the outside world, especially our overseas friends and donors.”
There are problems however. Electricity goes off very frequently and the hospital generator fails repeatedly.
CHC currently only has six computers, two printers and one photocopier for the whole place. Stephen explains, “We are not at all equipped as a normal UK hospital of the same size would be. Most software that can be purchased in Bangladesh is pirated and often contaminated. So our use of technology is limited for many reasons beyond our control.”