Issue no 4, 1999 -- English edition -- home
Page: -- Contents -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, (7), 8
"The KLM flight lifted at 6.50 a.m. from Arlanda, Stockholm. 36 hours later I was in the surgical ward at Ndolage Hospital in Tanzania. A 10 year old boy with a pelvic fracture and urinary tract completely torn off could not empty his bladder and needed immediate surgery. Together with some twenty schoolboys, he had been on an outing the day before. They had been riding in the back, on the platform of a small lorry that had rolled. Twelve of them were admitted, two with severe injuries. In this way I got a flying start and soon found my feet."
This is what Dr Arne Kjellgren, from Skellefteå, Sweden, tells us. At publication time, he is out again for a three-month period at this mission hospital run by the Swedish Church. The people here are very poor.
"Most of the patients have little money, and many are almost without. Just about every day there is some patient who says he or she must go home because there is no more money."The need for a surgeon in the area around Ndolage is just as great as always, ever since the hospital was founded over 70 years ago. There is currently no candidate who is prepared to stay here for a longer time."
The situation is the same at most mission hospitals. The Doctor Bank surgeon relays are one solution.
|
Dr Jarl Magnusson, from Sunne, Sweden, was the Doctor Bank's first jeep-doctor in 1994. He has since then been out every year-this autumn as jeep-doctor on the Lake Magadi Line in Kenya. |
In a recent issue of the content rich Swedish newsletter OmVärlden, 7/99, published with support from Sida (Swedish Board for International Development Cooperation), the journalist Mats Sundgren reviewed a book by Martin Foreman, "Aids and Men: Taking Risks or Taking Responsibility". Here a short extract (from the book):
"In Rwanda's capital Kigali, women with only one sex partner are the hardest hit by AIDS. This is the reward for their fidelity to their men. Why don't they force their unfaithful men to use condoms? For the simple reason that women in large parts of the world do not have the ability to control when and how they have sex with their men. Condoms are seldom a realistic option. When a middle class woman on Jamaica asked her husband to use a condom, she received the answer that he could find lots of women who would not ask this."'I didn't dare challenge him, because I am afraid to lose him,' she explained.
"Men are the motor behind the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Women are the hardest hit, but it is the sexual behaviour of a significant minority of men that allow the spread of the virus. Although more men than women are today HIV-positive, this relationship will be the reverse within ten years. Millions of women will be able to protect themselves against AIDS first when their male partners realize the necessity."
See what a Rotary club with 65 members can accomplish: yet another jazz concert arranged by Mark Rotary Club, in Kinna, Sweden.
Shown
is the cover of a programme with 32 pages, 28 of which have ads. This translates
into much money for the Doctor Bank-how much, we can surely report in the
next issue of this newsletter.
In a letter, Mr Curt Tilly, managing not only the concert arrangements, but also the so-called towel project, tells us "the orders received so far guarantee the Doctor Bank 70,000 Crowns. But we hope for more."