Malaria

It’s Rainy Season & We Need Mosquito Nets!

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Last week we had 7 girls to come to the Haven Clinic with malaria. Nurse Sherry didn’t get her Sunday off, because she was tending to all the cases!

The treatment for malaria is a week-long course of IV infusions. It requires a temporary canula that is left in for the whole course of treatment, as well as the nurse to administer the medication. With 7 girls currently receiving treatment, that’s a lot of medicine and supplies!

Malaria makes you feel terrible, but left untreated it can cause brain damage, or lie dormant in the liver only to cause relapse and illness later. We had a boy in the basketball camp we held in 2013 who had been quite severely impacted by cognitive impairment due to untreated malaria.

Why now?

It’s rainy season, and that means lots of puddles, filled drainage ditches, and other areas of stagnant water. While we have mosquito nets in our residential houses, those do get torn, or mosquitoes can be trapped inside during the day.

Currently, the tailoring class is repairing all of our mosquito nets, but that still leaves all the girls in our program who go home to houses without. We have a project up on DonorSee right now for 25 nets, the first effort to get nets to 100% of our students and staff.

You can help – a donation of any size gets us closer to a net for everyone!

Let’s buy some nets!

Free Health Care Is Crucial To Our Girls

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Since we opened the Ross House in November 2020, providing health care and medical treatment for our girls has been a priority. It is a lot easier to get sick while living in Uganda’s largest slum than it is to stay well!

Up until February, we sent all our sick girls to Dr. Francis, who gave us a discounted rate and didn’t require up-front payment. Still, the cost of an exam, treatment, hospital visits for daily IV injections, and transportation added up. And the bigger we got, the more we spent. (Thank goodness for our partnership with DonorSee that started in September 2021!)

But one day in January along came the idea fairy, who dropped the idea of an on-site clinic in my head. After adding up what we’d averaged per month on medical treatment and comparing it to what we’d have to pay a full-time nurse plus medications and supplies, it was quite obvious that the better solution was to open an on-site clinic.

Lately, we’ve had a run of typhoid in our community, thanks to the rains and dirty, contaminated water that the girls drink at home. Malaria also surges when there are lots of puddles and congested drainage ditches for mosquitoes to breed in.

Because of the Haven Clinic and nurse Sherry, however, our costs are still below what we spent in an average month treating fewer girls. The girls and children are healthier and do better in class. And few are getting very sick now, since we can treat things when they start, not when they’re “bad enough to justify a doctor visit.” It’s been a big win-win!

As always, thank you so much for your support! Please forward this and all our emails to anyone you know who might be interested in our work. I’m available to speak to groups, too! Just use the Contact form!

Webele nyo!

Jennings

THE CLINIC IS OPEN!

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During 2021, we had a LOT of medical issues come up for our girls and babies. The most common were malaria and typhoid, but we’ve also had intestinal parasites, pneumonia, and burns… to name a few.

We have a wonderful doctor who sees our girls at a discount and without requiring payment up front. But he does, of course, require payment in short order, as does the hospital where most treatments have to be done. (Many meds for advanced typhoid and malaria, as well as antibiotics for children, are done through an IV canula that stays in for a week). Plus there’s transport to and from the hospital on boda bodas.

We’ve done a LOT of DonorSee projects to cover medical bills… So I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it before, but in January it hit me: OPEN A CLINIC, DUMMY!

So we did! We’d contracted for more space within our compound in August, and at the end of the year most of it was finally ready. That allowed us to move the Ross House girls to a more private apartment area and free up rooms in the main house. VOILA! A clinic was born.

We are now officially open for business, with a fully stocked medicine cabinet, first aid supplies, IV supplies, a bed, and a full time nurse.

We’ve already had our first patients!

Of course, this is free to our girls and their children (and our staff). But it’s not free to US. We will have ongoing expenses to restock medications and supplies, as well as the nurse’s salary. We also had the expense of setting it up. If you’d like to help, just click the button below – 100% goes to the program.

Thank you ALWAYS for your amazing support! We’re so grateful to have you with us.

Blessings,

Jennings

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