mweshi

This past weekend I had the opportunity of participating in a day long medical outreach with a few members from my Rotary club, Maluba. We traveled to a remote area given to the Anglican Church by government about 68km from Lusaka, called Kansenga. Maluba in collaboration with the Anglican Church of Lusaka is working on building a clinic in the Kasenga settlement with the involvement of the community in the building process.

Saturday was the groundbreaking day and we traveled to the settlement with medicines donated to our club by businesses and clothing donated from Japan. We also carried some maize meal (used in making Zambia’s staple food nshima) for the orphans who live within the same community.

The situation is quite dire for the people of the Kasenga settlement. To get any sort of medical services or attention, people have to walk 25km to the nearest clinic in Kasisi; the catchment area has about 2000+ people who need assistance; most of the people suffer from malaria,conjunctivitis, anaemia, worms, etc.; on our way back to Lusaka around 7PM, we had to take a young mother and her sick baby into the city so she could medical attention for the child. I sat next to the mother and child in the car and every time the baby’s head rested on my arm, my arm felt intensely hot, the baby’s temperature must have been close to 40 deg. Celsius. Our rotarian doctor suspected it was meningitis hence the urgency in referring the mother and child over to the UTH (University Teaching Hospital) in Lusaka for urgent medical attention for the child.

By the time we left Kasenga, we had registered, administered medicine, vitamins, and referrals as well as clothing to about 255 people from the community. For me, this was one of the most fulfilling days I have had as a rotarian and seeing the smiles on the faces of the people there in the midst of all that goes on around them on a daily basis was quite a humbling moment.

Kasenga is one of our club’s new projects for the year, though we have a few other projects including a school (Bauleni Primary School), a clinic (Bauleni Clinic) both of which the Maluba club helped in building, and the Bauleni SWAAZ family support home for orphans who’s parent(s) died from HIV/AIDS that we support monthly by giving food and clothing.

You can view a few more photographs in my Zambia photoset on Flickr