Hello everyone! Its Labour Day here in the DRC so I thought
I’d take the time to write up a short field update.
This week we took a trip out to Kavumu with Dr. Imani from
Médecins au Service des Démunis (MSD) to see the site of his future rural
clinic. You might remember my pictures from his current clinic here in Bukavu a
couple weeks ago – well, he’s hoping to pack it up soon to move out to Kavumu
to serve the population there as there is a lot more need there for a medical
centre .
The trek out to Kavumu did not take very long and we were
able to go out and come back in the space of an afternoon. Because of the
various road conditions, the trek involved both driving and walking, as per
usual.
This is us standing in front of the building behind the main
clinic building on the property
The clinic will be located in this house. It still needs a
lot of work to be ready to receive patients, but Dr. Imani and his team are
resourceful and dedicated and have a vision for how they want the space to work
for the services they want to provide here.
We also went around to the back of the building to see the
place where the latrines and such will be located...
Once the clinic is ready I don’t think Dr. Imani will have
any trouble whatsoever with finding patients. He is already very popular in
this area. It took us quite a while to get back to where we had left the
vehicle because so many of the folks we met wanted to stop to talk with the
Doctor.
This week I also spent a good amount of time in the office
learning about human-centered design (for designing solutions to problems for
people living on less than $2 per day) and helping Dominique to brainstorm ways
to support the work in Mulamba, where we were last week. Here is sample of the
fruit of our labours:
There’s more we’ve been doing this week (fundraising,
trudging through the 501c3 forms, meetings, etc.) but since I don’t have any
pictures of those things for this week, I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to
say that it has been another interesting and productive week for Channel in the
DRC.
Until next week!
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