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16714 91st
Ave. E.
Puyallup, WA 98375
a tax exempt 501 (c)(3) charity
NEWSLETTER # 52 December
2017
“I sincerely thank and pray
that you may never run shortage of food ever in your life.” This is taken from a thank you
message from a Maasai friend. This
friend has had experience with food shortages like going to bed with no dinner
for anybody in the family and then the next morning sharing a breakfast of
black tea – no sugar, no cream, just brown water. The kids go to school and the
parents work with hunger like that. While things are not as desperate here as
in war-torn places like Yemen or South Sudan, there is a gritty Tanzanian
reality in that Maasai prayer. Only
somebody who has gone to bed hungry would think of a blessing like “you may
never run shortage of food ever.”
Most Tanzanians live on the
edge. Lack of resources including lack of food is a very real threat. It is estimated that as many as 40% of
Tanzanians face “food insecurity,” the technical word for going to bed without
eating dinner. I regularly have patients with severe illnesses in the hospital
who come in from the bush country and are so emaciated that we have to use the
child blood pressure cuff to measure their blood pressure. That is how skinny
their arms are. The pediatrics
department has a malnutrition clinic to treat children who are in danger of
dying from starvation. Yes, sometimes they do die. After fluid and electrolyte
resuscitation, those children are sent home with a special high calorie
supplement to help them get back up to normal weight. The staff in the malnutrition
clinic go home with a knot in their stomach, knowing that their malnourished child
patient is going home with special food to a home with other children who are
also hungry.
Lack of resources affects all
aspects of life. The hospital I work in
doesn’t have the ability to do cultures.
They would like to do cultures, but can’t afford the technology and
supplies. Basic lab tests like kidney function or blood counts are often not
available since the lab can be out of the necessary chemicals to do the test.
The radiology department uses machines
that are usually donated outdated machines from American and European
hospitals. The ultrasound machines have
lost the doppler function so are not as useful as they could be. The “new” x-ray machine is a donated digital
machine that actually produces pretty nice images. You can only see the image on the computer
monitor in the x-ray department, but they are clear images. The problem with
this new system is that the electrical grid often fails so the hospital has to
function with electricity from their diesel generator. The “new” x-ray machine
requires more electricity than what the old generator can produce. The system will still make the old x-ray film
images like in the "old days" when the hospital is using the generator backup, but
the image quality is just not there.
Below are x-ray films (not the digital system) done last week. This elderly woman hasn’t walked in 5 years because of leg pain. You can see the fracture of the tibia (shin bone) in the left film. The right film shows the white outline of the femur (thigh bone) with abnormal calcium formation outside of the normal bone. The ball-and-socket hip joint in the top left corner is just a mess. A digital image can be manipulated to try to clarify things like that.
Maasai Health Systems is raising money this year to get a more powerful generator for the hospital so the x-ray quality won't suffer when the power grid goes down. As always, our administrative costs are low - just the cost of the newsletters. Typically, 98% to 99% of donations go to our project since all MHS "staff" are volunteers. We need to collect an additional $10,000 for this year in order to get the $30,000 generator. Hopefully the cost will not have inflated too much since a year ago when the hospital got the estimate and we started fund raising.
I thank you in advance for
your support.
Don Rowberg
president
Maasai Health Systems.
president
Maasai Health Systems.
