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The Mbande Clinic Project
Forty years ago, fresh from Medical School as a General Practitioner, I was first confronted with the reality of tropical diseases and health care in Africa. The contrast between day to day practise in Mozambique, and later Kenya, and the academic setting of my internships in Amsterdam was almost unimaginable. As could be expected, in our years in Africa I gained a lot of first line medical experience.
One day in 1990, visiting friends in Tanzania, I found myself in a small village clinic again: the Mbande Clinic some 40 km from Dar es Salaam. The doctor there was so kind to allow me to assist him and soon I discovered that little had changed in the field of health care since we had left Africa in 1975. During morning surgery I saw 75 patients. Mostly women and children. Like 15 years earlier, the most common diseases were malaria (33 per cent of all patients), worm and eye infections, bronchitis and angina, scabies, a variety of (badly) infected wounds, retarded infant growth or a combination of these.
Although officially called the Mbande Medical Centre, in reality it is little more than a bush clinic serving an extended hinterland. Many patients have to walk for hours to get there and mothers and their infants are often so dehydrated and exhausted that they lie on the concrete floor of the veranda in the shade of the trees. The veranda also serves as the waiting room for the other patients. Although the whole setting eyes chaotic, everyone knows exactly when it is his or her turn to see the daktari.
One of the major problems of the clinic is its lack of clean water. Every single drop has to come from a muddy and often contaminated pond at quite a walking distance. Women are allowed to give birth at the clinic only when their family provides them with two buckets of water! Another problem is the treatment of infected wounds in the same room (2x2 m) where the instruments are sterilised - in a pot with water on an open fire - and stored.
In the years that followed 1990 I visited the clinic regularly and tried to improve the situation a little by providing some medicines, bandage material and sterile needles. Until recently any contribution to try and solve some of the clinic’s structural problems was well beyond our reach. Our Africa Road Tour has changed that. We will probably be the last elderly European couple - with a working background going back to colonial times - crossing the African continent in a vintage Series III Land-rover. The publicity surrounding our tour we will exploit to raise money for the Mbande Clinic.
What we want to achieve is straightforward and practical:
To realise such a structural contribution, we need the equivalent of EURO 40.000. For that purpose we have opened a special bank account with ABN-AMRO in the Netherlands: ABN-AMRO account number 59 55 57 058: Mbande Clinic, Tanzania. Shortly - by means of a brochure - we will approach my and Paul’s professional network with a request to sponsor the clinic. In addition, we will ask our family and friends to contribute. In the brochure, among others, the Tanzanian Clinic Committee will be introduced to you.
© 2005 Paul and Meta Lapperre - Website by MvS
