Projects
There are various projects happening in Mtunthama at the moment.
St Andrew’s Hospital
It is remarkable that only six years ago St. Andrew’s was a small rural clinic with only a dozen staff: it is now a Community Hospital with a staff of 58! Many of them have been with the project from the beginning, and one of the really encouraging things is the fact that so many have progressed by dint of training courses to upgrade their qualifications.
NRU
The NRU continues to be central to the work of Medic Malawi. Several NGO’s support the work, but their criteria are more rigorous than we would wish, in that children have to be seriously malnourished before they become eligible for help. As almost half of all children in Malawi are chronically malnourished, at St. Andrew’s we seek to provide food and health care to children before they reach the point of malnutrition which would attract help from the NGO’s. This means that we need to fund both feeding programmes and health care supplements. We are also hoping to increase the follow-up procedures once children are discharged, in order to ensure their ongoing treatment and support.
Dental Surgery
A complete Dental Surgery provided by Dentaid is about to be shipped out from UK
Wrekin Orphan House
Wrekin College from Shropshire have made the orphans their special concern. This year they funded the construction of the second phase of the Orphan House, and built a kitchen to cater for 50-plus people. Additionally they started work on an irrigated garden to provide “relish” throughout the year, and made a play area for the children.
After the construction in 2005 of a medical laboratory at St. Andrew’s Hospital, we are approaching the completion of the operating theatre. Thanks to a generous donation from Aspect Capital Ltd., we are now in a position to finish construction and equip the theatre so that it should be in use by the end of the year.
HIV/AIDS Project
There is an HIV/AIDS project in nearby Wimbe, which is run entirely by volunteers and headed by Peter Minjale, one of our Clinical Officers. There is a team of 7 trained counsellors, each of whom has accepted responsibility for three villages, which he/she has undertaken to visit at least three times a week. Some of those villages involve a journey of 15kms each way. As there is no transport, they go on foot!