Mobile medical teams deliver care to orphans and MoH communities
Pilot project to run for 6 months

On a warm, sunny morning in May in the village of Matapila the crowds gathered ear ly outside of the MoH feeding center to get a good place in line and a cool spot in the shade. They came from all walks of village life – students and teachers, grandmothers and infants, chiefs and orphans – and all waited patiently, some for most of the day, to see a member of the Ministry of Hope mobile medical team. Each patient was greeted by an MoH volunteer, who took vital signs and assessed the nature of their problems. They were then ushered into one

of two small offices to see a member of the medical team. By the end of the day more than 50 patients had been seen.

“We saw acute infectious and chronic ailments in patients aged 3 months to 85 years,” said Dr. Ken Root, an MoH board member and physician from Mesa, Arizona who organized the clinics. “In the younger kids and orphans we saw a lot of pediatric problems from pneumonia to worm infestations to acute malaria. We also saw tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and bilharzias, a type of parasitic infection that comes from exposure to contaminated water.”

The scene had been much the same days earlier in the village of Chimwangombe, except for a life and death situation the team encountered in a young boy who was HIV positive and had tuberculosis. The young man’s mother had recently died of AIDS; he had no access to medical care or any way to get to a hospital and probably would have died without medical intervention. Soon after the medical clinic visit, a team from MoH was dispatched to take the boy and his father to a hospital in Lilongwe.

The mobile clinics operate out of a Land Cruiser equipped with a range of pharmaceuticals, basic medical equipment and diagnostic kits that test for malaria, blood glucose and hemoglobin. At each village, the team left behind a first aid kit, and Brandon Root, Ken’s son and a first-year medical student at the University of Arizona, conducted first aid seminars with the orphan care staffs and provided them with first aid manuals.

In addition to Ken and Brandon Root, the mobile medical team consisted of Mwawi Nyirongo, the medical director of the MoH crisis nursery, Sydney Kornegay and Paul Kim, both freshmen at Davidson College in North Carolina, and Rachel Robinson, a freshman at Texas Tech. There were also several MoH volunteers on hand to conduct medical tests and translate between patients and medical staff.

Ken Root developed the mobile medical concept after first visiting Malawi in the summer of 2006. “I thought a Mobile Medical Clinic would fit in with the mission of Ministry of Hope,” he said. “ It can complement what we do by providing basic health care to the entire community to help restore their dignity and provide some hope and relief of any suffering they have.”

Root said the mobile clinics would run as a pilot project in a few of the villages for six months and then expand to all of the villages MoH serves if there is adequate funding. He estimates costs for the pilot project will be approximately $15,000. MoH board member Bill Kaneft, president of Colonial Packaging Company in Columbia, S.C., has spearheaded an effort that has already raised the bulk of those funds.

“The mobile clinic idea was a practical, holistic approach to orphan and community care,” said Kaneft. “I asked a handful of people to give and they really responded. We had the $15,000 in about a month’s time. I hope the pilot project works out and it becomes a permanent program of Ministry of Hope.”