Validation.

Yesterday we went out into the rural areas of Chennai to tour four clinics with our new office manager, Ezra, a Chennai native. Some clinics had relatively impressive facilities, while others brought on tears. Dark hallways, operating rooms without windows, strong smells, hundreds of people lying on stairwells and in hallways, babies the size of my palm … Zambia seems like a first-world country in comparison.

One small, dark room had twenty mothers (all of whom had given birth in the past 48 hours) sitting on the ground with their preemies lying next to them on small washcloths. There were only a few incubators and phototherapy devices, so the women had to take turns switching their babies in and out of the machines. Some units, which were designed to hold one baby a piece, had four infants crammed under one warmer. Another room had two babies with heaving chests lying in a bed by the window – the best “phototherapy” and warmer they could afford. The head nurse told us many of the babies wouldn’t make it.
In my book, no further need validation for inexpensive phototherapy is required.