Ampasinambo is near the East coast of Madagascar. We usually combine this MMS with one to Sahakevo, over a two-week period.
The team left Tana on Saturday April 15th. For this mission, we collaborated with the Lutheran and the Catholic Church of Ampasinambo. They led the message every morning before the activity.
We were 7 people from Tana but we already have a local team which is part of MMS team for the week in Ampasinambo. The head doctor of the CSBII of Ampasinambo also helped us a lot during this mission. The local authorities are sympathetic to the work and spread the news of our visit which is partly why so many people came.
Most of the patients live 60 -100 km from Ampasinambo, including from Nosy Varika, Marolambo who have come to be operated on. For the return back to Tana, we made a stopover in Nosy Varika as usual, the team had to be transported in 2 sessions from Ampasinambo to Nosy Varika because of the weight capacity of the MAF plane.
Malnutrition and especially malaria affect many children in Ampasinambo. The populations have become increasingly poor, especially after the passage of cyclones Batsirai and Cheneso. One woman had walked for four days with her 5 children and husband to get to Ampasinambo. According to her, their crops and home were destroyed during the cyclone and there was none left anymore for the family.
Because of the large number of patients who were already waiting for us, we decided to start working on Sunday afternoon after church. Most of the people had arrived in the village 2 days before us. Five people were already hospitalized because of malaria, ascites. We gave them the necessary care and treatment. The surgery team performed an ascites puncture. For the medical consultations, the most treated cases are schistosomiasis, dermatology, gastralgia, cough and flu, malnutrition, and especially malaria. Many children convulse while the doctor consults them, it is because of malaria. Most patients have ascites due to schistosomiasis.
As every mission to Ampasinambo, Emeldinah (left), Medevac’d in 2019 with hydrocephalus, came to visit the team with her mother. Although she cannot walk or speak, she has grown well, and it is difficult for her mother to carry her. We hope to offer her a stroller.
We found a new examination table in our storage room in Tana and we offered it to the Ampasinambo hospital as a collaboration and so that we could use it during our mission because the one in the hospital is already very old and damaged and we can no longer use it for the next missions.
Overall, this mission to Ampasinambo was a great success with 565 people seen and treated.
The arrival of many patients has motivated our team well. We worked until Thursday afternoon, but we had no more drugs and had to stop. Many people were still waiting to be consulted, especially for medical consultation and surgery; most of them living very far from Ampasinambo.
The second day of our mission, the weather was very bad, it was raining but that did not prevent many people from coming and trying their luck to be consulted by the doctor.
We have 2 cases that need to be evacuated to Tana for surgery, a 10-year-old child with large multiple lymph nodes on both sides of his throat (see photo), and a 16-year-old boy whose right arm has had osteitis for 5 years.
Early pregnancy is a big problem to manage in Ampasinambo because most young girls have their first child at the age of 14-15 without even having the notion of motherhood. They don’t even have mother’s milk and the babies are malnourished.
STATISTICS
Medical consultation 304; Ultrasound 64; Dental extraction 164; Surgery: major 27, minor 6
