Working against all odds!

Fall of 2022, while we were working on the first phase of our vaccine cold chain project, Bolivia faced multi-regional strikes which hindered our ability to find, purchase, and transport refrigerators necessary for storing vaccines. Shopping in the rainforest is often a challenging and complicated experience. There aren’t any retail giants with loads of inventory to choose from; online shopping is difficult when you don’t always have electricity or an address to deliver to; and getting deliveries to the region is hard enough without the various commercial and transportation strikes that cropped up last year.

The odds were against us, but Ivo, our local coordinator, was relentless in finding a way to get refrigerators to our communities and keep the project going. He spent hours each day, searching online and calling stores across the country - from La Paz to Santa Cruz. Despite his efforts, he discovered most stores had almost no inventory, and there was no way to verify the quality and specifications of the refrigerators online and over the phone. Ivo was disappointed but undeterred. He asked his daughter, Iara, to go to various equipment suppliers in the cities of La Paz and El Alto and verify the quality and availability.

The strikes broke the supply chain for many products - including refrigerators - and Iara made multiple trips to different stores throughout the cities. After much travel and frustration, she finally found a store in El Alto with the refrigerators we needed, and so she purchased them and some electricity stabilizers we had been desperately looking for.

Buying the refrigerators was just the start. We needed them shipped and delivered to San Ignacio de Moxos…in the middle of a public transportation strike…with roadblocks. It seemed like a hopeless situation, but Ivo didn’t miss a beat. He contacted several of his business associates - fellow cattlemen and butchers - to arrange the transportation of our refrigerators from El Alto to San Ignacio de Moxos. This required detailed coordination, patience, and perseverance while working with multiple individuals and timelines.

Against all odds, the three refrigerators arrived Sunday, November 20th at 10:37 pm in a “Reefer” (a truck that maintains a specific temperature control environment for the transportation of food such as beef) after an 18-hour drive from El Alto.

We were so happy to see them arrive, but, almost immediately, we faced a new challenge - unloading and storing them. Again, Ivo came to our rescue and arranged for two of his acquaintances to meet us at the unloading area and move the refrigerators from the Reefer to his personal truck and then transport them to his house for safekeeping. It is nothing short of AMAZING that Ivo helped us accomplish this phase of the project in just 3 weeks and for less than $80 in transportation fees!

Now, we needed just a few more things to complete the equipment needed for the vaccine cold chain, wooden bases for each refrigerator to protected from ground water damage and motorcycle transport boxes for the special vaccine cold transport boxes that came from the U. S. Ivo came to the rescue again. He arranged for a local carpenter to build wooden bases and a local gutter builder to construct three metal motorcycle transport-boxes.

We met with the Mayor of San Ignacio de Moxos and the leadership of the DIMUSA (the office of Health Director of the municipality) to work out the logistics of when and how the health center and health posts were to be supplied with electrical power. As you may imagined, may obstacles and reasons were given. (It had been 3 years since the requests had been placed by the local doctors and local authorities) and here we were! No electric power. No way to run the refrigerators.

Read the next blog to find out what happened…