Kilema Hospital

It has been a busy couple of days. We are now oriented to Moshi and made our way (via old Land Rover) to the Kilema hospital where the HIV clinic that CACHA is building is in progress. The building of the clinic has gone slower than planned (well slower than the Canadians planned). It will be able to house a discpensary for ARV's, a classroom for counselling and teaching and a lab for testing. There is minimal in the way of HIV infrastructure here. Well, really, there is very little of any infrastructure. The hospital is spotlessly clean but extremely primitive. The wards hold 6-8 patients each and the 'ICU' (picture to be attached tomorrow) consisted of three hospital beds (like real beds that we migth have in the basement storage of a North American Hospital) and no oxygen or monitors...just a room called ICU with extra space for a nurse to stay at the bed side. Sister Clarissa, the hospital matron is looking for a donation of an oxygen concentrator and a pulse oxymeter. These are things she could use to try to keep people alive while they wait for medications to start working. They are starting to see fewer acute deaths from HIV because the ARV's (1 or 2 drugs) are available through the Global Fund to fights HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB. They still have many people living in the villages surrounding the hospital who cannot or will not come to the hospital to be treated. The stigma of HIV is still very difficult to live with here. The sad thing is that many of the young women are pregnant and need to be treated during delivery to minimize transmission of the virus to there babies. The hospital (with CACHA) has a PMTCT program now up and running but they need to get the word out and get the women treated. Sister is so resourceful that she has a group of local Tanzanian volunteers who do 'homebased' care and go out to the villages to find sick people to get them to the treatment program or to return weekly with therapy for them once they have been confirmed with testing. The hospital is in desperate need of everything including simple things like blankets. The nights are cold in that stone building (they are on the side of the mountain). Most of the beds had a flimsy wool blanket that was not big enough to cover people's feet.
The orphan program now has 300 orphans in it. They currently come on the last Friday of the month to be 'checked over' and get tea and bread. They take home with them some basic supplies to get them through (rice, cooking oil, soap etc). Ahmed, who is on site working for CACHA right now is setting up a system to track the orphans (who they are, where they are from, HIV status and other health issues). They want to break up the group into weekly groups of 50-60 kids so they can spend more time with them and provide more care. The sister's do their best but some weeks they have very little to give the orphans to eat. Some have walked several kilometres to get there in the hopes of a small hand out. There is nothing else I can really say, we really just don't realize how lucky we are. It is hard to describe what it is really like. These people really do live with NOTHING but the clothes they have on and a small shelter.

On a positive note, the hospital grounds and the trip to Kilema were quite beautiful. I will attach some pictures tomorrow.
More to come tomorrow...