John Green: Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. I can show you almost nothing of Koidu Government Hospital. I cannot show you the children's emergency ward.

I can't show you the adult wards. I can't show you the non-communicable disease clinic where hundreds of people receive care for hypertension and diabetes and sickle cell disease every day. I cannot show you the wound care ward or the tuberculosis ward or the pharmacy or the mental health clinic because all those places are packed with patients, packed! 

And I can't film people in a health care setting without informed consent. And so I have to show you little corners of the hospital, ceilings, and floors because everywhere else there are people, many hundreds of people receiving care every day. When I first visited KGH in 2019, it was a very different place.

Many improvements had already been made with support from Partners in Health. There was running water and 24-hour electricity, but there was, for example, no ability to perform ultrasounds or treat diabetes. And there were vastly fewer patients in the hospital because there just wasn't as much care available and people didn't have the level of trust in the health care system they have today.

Now people can trust the health care system. As one doctor told me, "everyone knows this is the hospital where you come to get well instead of coming to die." That's why today the hospital is seeing more than three times as many people as it did when I first visited.

And so there's real hope here. Another doctor explained to me, "We're at an inflection point. We can finally treat cardiac arrest and stroke with good outcomes."

But it is also true that the current infrastructure of KGH is woefully insufficient to deal with the scope of need in this profoundly impoverished region of 600,000 people. Like there's no ICU in the hospital, but the ward for the sickest kids was extremely overcrowded when I visited with two or three children sharing every available bed. But the reason these places are so crowded is because they are providing real services.

At KGH, you get care with the staff, stuff, and systems, if not yet adequate space or social support to save lives. So that's the first difference Partners in Health is making when they work with governments to strengthen health care systems. PIH builds and maintains clinics and hospitals where you come to get well.

But there's another difference which is where the Maternal Center of Excellence truly shines as a beacon to the world. I can show you parts of the MCOE, Hank, because it actually contains adequate space. Gloriously adequate space!

Brilliantly designed and securely constructed. I mean, there's space for laboring outdoors for women who'd prefer not to be in beds and plenty of labor and delivery beds. There's space for women recovering from C-sections and space for ambulances and so much more.

I mean, compare this to the old maternity ward. Visiting the MCOE, Hank, I will confess that your correspondent wept with gratitude and astonishment. From the piped oxygen system to the still in construction laundry system to the 120 maternal beds to the nation's first ever neonatal intensive care unit, the MCOE has truly transformed the kind of care possible in Kono and in Sierra Leone.

In the NICU, I saw babies who months ago would have had a very low chance of survival who will now lead long and productive lives. In the C-section recovery wards, I met women whose lives would have been in grave danger just from giving birth, who are instead receiving the quality of care that you or I would expect and that everyone deserves. And after seven long years of fundraising and building, the MCE is precisely the kind of long-term response that transforms not just the lives of its patients, but the life of its community.

Plus, the facility is training the next generation of Sierra Leoneian nurses, midwives, and doctors, changing the shape of health care in the entire nation. It is a tremendous accomplishment. And most impressive to me, no corners were cut in its construction.

It is not an excellent maternal and infant care center for Kono or for Sierra Leone or for an impoverished country. It is an excellent maternal and infant care center. Hard stop.

While I was visiting the prenatal ward at the MCOE, I met a woman named Rebecca. When I asked her how many children she had, she said four children, one living. She'd suffered unimaginable loss.

Not because it was necessary or inevitable, but because, as it says at the entrance to the MCOE, the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world. But now, for the first time in her life, Rebecca was being cared for in a dignified space by well-trained and adequately supplied nurses and doctors who'd identified that her pregnancy was extremely high risk both for mother and baby. And as a result, she was staying in the MCOE's antenatal ward before a C-section's scheduled for later this week.

Rebecca was scared. She told me she was worried about being cut open, about having another still birth, about not being able to hold a living child. If this had been 2019, the nurse caring for Rebecca could not totally have reassured her.

Pregnancy in Kono was dangerous. But because Rebecca was at the MCOE, her nurse could tell her the truth. "You do not need to be worried," she told her. "Just today, the doctors have performed nine C-sections with no complications. Nine healthy mothers, nine healthy babies."

And then the nurse said, "With one procedure, we saved two lives." 500 babies were born at the MCOE just in its first six weeks of its operation, Hank, including over 200 C-sections, many of them emergencies that might have otherwise resulted in maternal and child death. One procedure, two lives. It is hard comfort to hope that one day Rebecca will be able to say "five children, two living."

But it is progress nonetheless. And for that mother, for that child, it is the world. It is life itself.

There is more work to do, Hank. Much more miles to go before I sleep. As Robert Frost put it, "we need more centers of excellence."

But what a blessing to be able to do that work together. What a blessing to stand here at a world-class facility in a place too long deemed unworthy of world-class facilities and to know that our community has fought and scrapped to build this place and will fight and scrap to maintain it in the years to come. I have never been so proud.

I know this is only the beginning, Hank, but what a beginning. I'll see you on Friday.