Story from Tanzania: Life is Good

This email from Executive Director August Burns a few weeks ago was too good not to share:

February 13, 2011

It’s 87 degrees according to my LL Bean travel clock. I notice the temperature as we move from place to place. It must have been 95 today as we sat in the Air Tanzania office in Kigoma trying to make our way back across the country—for some of us onto the next phase of this trip, for others on their way back home.

Air Tanzania, the successor to “Precision Air” has just announced that their plane needs maintenance and therefore there will be no flights out of Kigoma for a week. Yes, that’s a week. One plane apparently. So after 5 hours of trying to match flights to other places and then to Dar es Salaam, the capital of this country, we have hired a car and driver to take us the ten hour drive to Mwanza where we will catch a connection to Dar and then to Arusha. It is always a good reminder of the rationality of the speed that life proceeds here. As my good friend Emmanuel Mtiti has said through his broad smile:

“Don’t worry. If you do, you will have a heart attack and life is so very short”.

So we will give up the idea of a day off and pile into the car for our journey tomorrow. I will tell myself that I always wanted to see Lake Victoria.

The morning started out so well. We had our end of trip “debrief” bringing together our partners in this program around the table again. Our coffee partner Kanyovu was well represented, as were our community builders Malilo, head CBDA and Annah, community mobilizer extraordinaire. We also had the administrator from Matyazo Hospital, our good friend Laura from Sustainable Harvest and two representatives from our new partner ICAP. This meeting was essentially the wrap up of our project in many ways. Though our commitment was for three years, we had met all the goals we had set out and ICAP was ready to take the lead.

Our Goals:

• See at least 2000 women for services
• Train a minimum of 15 health care providers in VIA and cryotherapy
• Train at least 15 CBDAs in cervical cancer prevention out reach
• Develop at least two treatment sites that offered cryo therapy

Actual Results:

• Saw more than 3000 women in 11 sites providing VIA
• Trained 30 doctors and nurses to provide VIA and cryo
• Trained 15 CBDAs plus 22 more to be trained from 11 new coop member communities in the next two months
• Established 7 treatment sites, which are now functioning

As we realized that we had together far exceeded our goals, in a place that had never before seen and services addressing this major killer of women, the air was electric. A small group of people had come together from around the world, from completely different positions and places and had accomplished an incredible feat, and the work had only just begun.

In the last two weeks, we not only accomplished a refresher training for ten providers and a complete round of didactic and clinical training for a new group of ten, but we had seen 434 women for services.  175 tested VIA positive and almost all of whom (88%) received same day treatment and returned to their homes and families.

The most amazing news came from Matyazo where Dr. Ute Tratwain, a German doctor in the mission hospital there, sent a letter to let us know that  her clinic has finally managed the purchase of LEEP Electrodes.

Now the Kigoma region, the orphan region of Tanzania, which always get the least, will be perhaps the first region in Tanzania not only with a cervical cancer program, but with a complete program, from community-based education and mobilization to quality accessible services, to same day or local preventive treatment, to now having the referral ability to care for women with large lesions or early cancers, to a fund for women who need more intensive cancer therapy, to now a place at Matyazo which will offer pain control and palliative care for those few women who will die of cervical cancer so they could die comfortable at home with their families.

All in two years. If we can do it in Kigoma, we can do it anywhere.

Very, very happy.

August & Elisa