The medical supplies had been shipped. The planning began a year in advance. Then the coronavirus arrived, and Dr Charmaine Emelife's heart sank.
The annual trip to Nigeria to provide free medical care -- the flagship project of the Association of Nigerian Physicians in the Americas -- had been set to start Sunday but can't go on.
Now the 4,000-member organisation, like diaspora medical groups around the world, is scrambling for other ways to help back home, where it might be more needed than ever before.
A global "brain drain" of medical professionals to richer countries has left developing nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and elsewhere without tens of thousands of highly skilled workers.
Some 30 per cent of doctors in the US, and one-third of those in the UK, were foreign-born as of 2016, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
At the same time, sub-Saharan Africa has a painful shortage of medical professionals, with access to just 3% of the world's health workers, according to the World Health Organization. Nigeria has four doctors per 10,000 people. Kenya has just two.
But even as some doctors, nurses and others overseas yearn to return to help with the coronavirus crisis, they face travel restrictions that have slammed shut borders and closed international airports.
"There are said to be no commercial passenger flights going into Nigeria from the US, and the US is not receiving the same flights," Emelife, the Nigerian association's president, told The Associated Press.
"The issue of going back to Nigeria at this point to help is not a conversation."
Instead, the association is raising money to buy and ship protective equipment for front-line workers, reaching far beyond its US base for sources.
When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-16 briefly spread to Nigeria, the association focused on sending "tons and tons" of protective gear, Emelife said.
But the task is far more difficult now as the rest of the world competes for the same supplies.
So the association is also exploring telemedicine, Emelife said, in which members can offer long-distance consultations for patients in Nigeria, where some private medical practices have shut down out of caution, further limiting options for care.
"If what is happening in the US or Italy should dare happen in Nigeria, there would be complete, total disorder," said Dr Biodun Ogunbo, who closed his private surgery facility in the capital, Abuja, for a month after the country's first cases were reported.
Currently, Nigeria's cases number nearly 450, but health experts say Africa is just weeks behind Europe and the US in the pandemic and the worst is yet to come.
"It's the personnel that matter," Ogunbo said. "We don't have the numbers of trained medical doctors, nurses, pharmacists" for the 24-hour care that some virus patients need.
For most people, the coronavirus causes mild to moderate symptoms such as fever and cough. But for some, especially older adults and those with other health problems, it can cause pneumonia and death.
The thousands of Nigerian medical workers in the diaspora, Ogunbo said, would "definitely, 100%" be welcome, along with insights into how virus cases are being treated overseas.
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