INDEPENDENCE, Mo. – Plans for a new hospital in Independence will translate into medical help for people in Ethiopia.

Four floors of Independence Regional Health Center have been closed for months as the hospital prepares to move into a new, $225 million hospital in 2007. The equipment on those floors won’t go to the new hospital.

Instead it’s going to Ethiopia, and might spur construction of the first modern hospital in Addis Ababa, a city of nearly 5 million people.

Volunteers worked during the weekend to load $400,000 worth of tables, beds, shelves, IV towers and more into a trailer to be shipped overseas.

The equipment will literally be a lifesaver in Ethiopia, said James Everett, president of the Ethiopia Health Support Foundation.

“To them, it’s trash. To us, it’s gold,” Everett said.

At first, the equipment will fill the ground floor of an already existing building in Addis Ababa. Eventually, Everett hopes, the value of the equipment will prompt city leaders to fund a new $7 million hospital to help an underserved community.

The equipment’s journey actually began 15 years ago, when two University of Kansas students had dinner with Everett.

The students, Akeza Teame and Sisay Shimelis, told Everett of life in Ethiopia and their dreams to take what they learned at Kansas back to their home country. They wanted to create something great in Ethiopia, but they didn’t know what. But Everett was skeptical. He said he had seen it before: youthful enthusiasm and no plan.

He told the students to come back in two years, and he didn’t think he’d see them again.

But two years later, Teame called Everett. Now focused on getting a medical degree, he told Everett of his new goal to create a modern hospital in his native land.

Everett told Teame and Shimelis to draft a plan. They eventually presented the plan to officials in Ethiopia, the World Bank and elsewhere. It was rejected.

Finally, city leaders in Addis Ababa said if the group could collect $600,000 worth of medical equipment and supplies, the city would pay for the construction of the hospital.

By then, the mission had become as much Everett’s dream as that of the two Ethiopian students, he said. Everett began to search Kansas City for equipment.

When Independence Regional was taken over by HCA, the hospital was suddenly full of equipment ready to be replaced, said Matt Smithmier, a spokesman for the hospital.

Saturday was moving day, and friends of Everett, Teame and Shimelis loaded the cargo into the first of three trailers they’ll send to Ethiopia by boat.

The plans are to have the equipment running in the existing building later this year.

And if all the equipment comes through, Everett said, he wants the new facility’s opening to coincide with the opening of the new Independence hospital, in the summer of 2007.