From Poznan to Kiabakari
The year 2008 saw a breakthrough in the work of Redemptoris Missio (Medicus Mundi Poland), as we successfully launched the Pier Giorgio Frassati Health Center in Kiabakari, Tanzania.
Kiabakari is a village in the Mara Region in northern Tanzania, Musoma Rural District. The project began in the year 2004 with the help of volunteers from Salesian Missionary Voluntary Service from Poland, who started to build a health center supported by Polish donors. A milestone development came in 2007, when the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs started to support the project with a donation from the “Polish Aid” Program, which allowed construction of the health center to be completed and the purchase of medical equipment and medicines essential to begin working with patients.
The first patients were admitted on 18 January 2008 by two Polish doctors, Gabriela Majkut and Jakub Kowalczyk, the medical coordinators of the project, both of them Redemptoris Missio volunteers. Today there are two clinical officers, two laboratory assistants, three nurses and four medical assistants working in Kiabakari. Work is administrated by Mateusz Cofta, the President of Redemptoris Missio, and by the Medical Coordinator Jadwiga Żyłka.
The mobile clinic
The Kiabakari Health Center is now well supplied with medical diagnostic equipment (hematologic and biochemistry analyzers, USG, fetal Doppler, ELISA). The laboratory and the dispensary work six days a week. The Mother and Child Health Clinic is run in cooperation with the District Medical Office of Musoma. There are also two wards (male and female) for hospitalization, with seven beds each. Outreach mobile clinics are organized twice a month to help people living in villages at a distance from Kiabakari to acccess mother and child health care, vaccination programs and antimalarial treatment.
Kiabakari has three main funding sources: money from a health insurance fund, donations made by Redemptoris Missio supporters, and patients’ fees. The administration is making efforts to obtain additional financial resources from the District Medical Officer for training staff and for the mobile clinics – everything to provide better-quality health care and to reach more local people.
The health center has to develop and come up to people’s expectations and needs. Redemptoris Missio and the Poznań University of Medical Sciences are therefore trying to develop cooperation with the Weill-Bugando College of Health Sciences in Mwanza, Tanzania. The cooperation should include scientific cooperation, medical staff exchange and creating a community health center in Kiabakari. In October 2008 Prof. Krystyna Pecold, an ophthalmologist, spent two weeks in Kiabakari consulting patients with eye problems. This was the first of many Polish medical expeditions to Tanzania planned for the coming years.
Redemptoris Missio hopes that its past and future activities are the right steps to take to reach the long-term aims of maintaining high-quality assistance for the Kiabakari region and providing access to primary health care for more people.
Justyna Polowy and Mateusz Cofta, Medicus Mundi Poland, in: MMI Annual Report 2008
