Time in Tanzania: Delivering Supplies & Assistance
PfaP was delighted when we were contacted by Jennifer Ruys, the wife of Dr. Vincent DiGregorio, to see how they could Pack for a Purpose during their visit to Zanzibar. Here is the record of their experience and the Big Impact they made along the way:
Dr. Vincent DiGregorio, board member of Mission: Restore, visited Zanzibar to deliver supplies and discuss health care needs among the island’s residents. He met with Dr. Chris Goes, currently the resident doctor at the Makunduchi Hospital on the southern tip of the island. A British NGO, Health Improvement Project: Zanzibar, is partnering with the Zanzibar Health Ministry to improve services at the hospital. Dr. Goes is a British doctor who is volunteering there for six months. Zanzibar is located off the coast of Tanzania, Africa, in the Indian Ocean.
Left: Dr. Vincent DiGregorio gives Dr. Chris Goes a shipment of sutures at the Makunduchi Hospital in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The small cottage hospital serves 20,000 patients in the southern part of the the island.
Reviewing maternity ward statistics over the past two years. A primary goal of the hospital is to provide high quality prenatal and early childhood care to the women and children of the region.
Dr. Goes and Hospital Administrator Zainab Othman review the shipment of sutures that Dr. DiGregorio brought from the United States. Sutures are expensive items for a rural hospital.
The Hospital Administrator Zainab Othman thanks Dr. DiGregorio for the shipment.
The operating room at the Macanduchi Hospital where sutures and other supplies are necessary to care for patients.
Drs. DiGregorio and Goes discussing a case in the maternity ward of the hospital.
The hospital has 30 in-patient beds and deals primarily with emergency medicine, maternity care, communicable diseases, and family planning. Major trauma cases and complicated surgical cases are sent to the main hospital several hours to the north.
Well baby checkups and early childhood care are critical to the hospital’s work because 1 in 12 infants die in Zanzibar – often from preventable causes.
