Although Semiliki Trust helps many health centres, medical coordinators and diverse projects thanks to our supporters’ generous donations, the majority of the work keeps going because of the ingenuity of the teams who run each centre.
Mutendero in the Butembo region is a good example of a health centre that, in the near absence of other support, has learnt to rely on the dynamism of the local community and careful management of the meagre receipts from patients. With these resources they have managed to build a brick block to admit sick children with life-threatening infections, and a wooden outpatient structure for child vaccination clinics:
In addition, the nursing team manages land in the fertile valley below the centre, planting cabbages and beans for short term income and trees that will one day provide both sticks for building staff houses and wood to sell:
Nurse in charge, Paluku, and his wife Furaha (which means “happy”) live on site in a stick and mud walled house with an iron sheet roof. Furaha cooks over two open fires, making delicious bean dishes and goat stew, which Semiliki founder, Nigel, was able to enjoy during a visit to Eastern DRC at the end of last year:
