Access to affordable medical care is practically non-existant in rural Uganda. Seeing a doctor usually means they have to hike for miles. The ill are often carried on makeshift stretchers by friends or family—a bumpy journey that sometimes takes hours.

EMAS is assisting a small NGO called RAMBIA, located near Fort Portal, in western Uganda. To get to their location, we must take a four-hour bus ride from Kampala, a short taxi ride and then almost an hour on a motorbike slip-sliding up a muddy trail towards the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains. In the rainy season, the trail is impassable. So not surprisingly, infant mortality is a high 15%. Life expectancy is 50 years. The proportion of households with access to safe drinking water is 7%, and less than 1% of the population has access to electricity.

December 2009

An EMAS CANADA team volunteered to visit and to pay their own expenses. The team included doctors, a public health nurse and a water and sanitation engineer. The Executive Director of EMAS CANADA visited the project before the team, to ensure that accommodation, local travel and all necessary arrangements were in place to support the team; and Health Partners International agreed to provide medications to supplement what we could buy locally.

Working with the RAMBIA staff, the EMAS Team saw over 500 patients in two busy weeks. We visited a local school and gave vitamins and de-worming pills to several hundred students. We taught community health workers, and looked into ways of supplying water, electricity and improved sanitation to the Health Centre and neighbouring community. We are also investigating manufacturing anti-malaria bed nets locally, in a joint-venture with Rotary.

Since our return, we have been blessed by several donations which we remitted immediately to RAMBIA. The money is to be used to install urgently needed windows for a partially completed maternity ward at the Health Centre. The ward is already in use, but it is the rainy season and the wind is blowing the rain onto the patients.

Having seen the need-particularly the high incidence of disease and the lack of good facilities-we are even more committed to working with RAMBIA and its community on a range of health-related issues. I'm overwhelmed by how our Lord has inspired people to respond and has enabled us to have come this far in a short time. We are seeking donors and additional team members.

Drs. Paul & Debbie Zeni