Way to go Mamas!

Pictured in the dining tent on the mountain are Dorathea, Karen, Secunda, Agnes and Anna, the Mamas, the HIV+ women who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and the woman who gave them the opportunity. A big thank you to Karen for her go for it nothing can stop me living life to the fullest maximizing every moment in life attitude!

To read more about the clinic and working in Tanzania, visit Karen's blog and Jenn's blog of the trip and more:

www.sunoverkili.blogspot.com

www.carpenter-chardsintanzania.blogspot.com


Dr. Karen Yeates, who founded the clinic in Moshi, is working with an American Foundation to start a dialysis program in Moshi. Currently, there are no established programs of dialysis in Tanzania. There may be a hemodialysis program starting in Dar es salaam for patients who can pay the high amount required. Otherwise, patients will try to travel to Kenya or abroad to seek care. Most cannot afford it. Karen is working in partnership with the hospital in Moshi to help start the program at the consultant hospital and will provide temporary peritoneal dialysis for women and children. This will meet the needs of women who suffer from acute kidney failure as a result of post partum hemorrhage and children who get kidney failure from diarrheal disease; both conditions patients can usually recover their kidney function in time, if they receive supportive care with temporary dialysis. Patients will need to pay for this treatment but they are working to make the program affordable and sustainable from the outset so that it is more likely to survive and be successful.

Karen is a kidney specialist who had a big interest in public health and women's issues before she went to medical school. After she finished her medical training she did Nephrology as her subspecialty (after Internal Med) and then still had a burning desire to get public health training so she went to Harvard and did an MPH (masters in public health) and spent a few years developing her academic career at Queen's University mostly in research in health disparities and access to care. She studies access to kidney transplantation for Aboriginal People as a model for how minorities access technologically advanced health services. She felt a nice connection with working in Africa as much of what goes on here is about access to care. Karen first came to Tanzania in October 2006 as a vacation/logistical trip with her husband. She and her husband had signed on with CACHA as volunteers and were planning to spend six months in Tanzania with their family and they were going to work on various HIV projects for CACHA while here. Soon she was introduced to Mama Minde and they discussed her vision of starting a shelter for those women who access legal aid through her organization KWIECO (in Karen's blog). Karen and Mama Minde rented a building while in Moshi and eventually the Women's center was born! Karen's biggest drive after that was to establish some improved free health care and women centered health education for Pamoja Tunaweza clients and other women in the region. CACHA had already done 4 health caravans around the villages in the area and so Karen utilized their ideas and focussed it on women with CACHA's full support.

The first women's only caravan was April 2008 and you can read about that in www.sunoverkili.blogspot.com A small women's clinic is now open in the center and as it grows, the women residents will likely be shifted to a new location that is less public. An outreach business/microloan support program is run from the center now too and other outreach initiatives are being established.

In terms of health care access in Tanzania, the poverty is grinding and for poor women and their children it can be impossible to get adequate care and medicine let alone education about their bodies. HIV care is now free for those who access it. Some other pediatric programs are also covered. Many still end up paying for medicine that are supposed to be free and women must make a choice to eat or buy medicine, but that is slowly changing.

Supporting programs like this directly helps the local people. Giving millions of dollars to governments in Africa can be like throwing money away (hey why not just buy them their own private plane and build them a palace). Grass roots efforts at change work and donors who support grass roots efforts can be sure their money is going straight to the people who need it.