A BUNBURY migrant has called on the city’s influential leaders to fight a horrifying health crisis in his home country.
John Bosco Odongo is spearheading a plan to build a sprawling health complex in Aboke, a rural town in northern Uganda.
Mr Bosco Odongo launched into action after returning from a trip to the area last year.
He left horrified at the conditions faced by people in the area.
He said he saw people drinking from water sources contaminated with faeces, heard of women dying from difficult deliveries without medical help and children dying from treatable malaria, dysentery and intestinal worm infestations.
Most rely on witch doctors and herbalists despite hospitals being in travelling distance because they cannot afford treatment.
“We want to do something that is going to save these lives, people will come from anywhere if you are giving them what they need – and they do need it,” Mr Bosco Odongo said.
The doctor to patient ratio across Aboke, the country’s Kole District, is zero per 300,000 people.
In regional Australia the ratio is 144.9 per 100,000 people, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
But there are other reasons for Mr Bosco Odongo’s ambitions.
When two of his sisters needed surgery he took them to a government-run hospital and was told he would need to supply rubber gloves and anaesthetic for their operations, a practice common in some areas of Uganda.
But the anaesthetic was never used during the operations and his sisters were “cut open completely awake.”
“Treating someone without anaesthetic is wrong and unethical – these sorts of things shouldn’t be happening in a place of medicine,” Mr Bosco Odongo told the Bunbury Mail.
“We want to build a health centre based on the basic fundamentals of compassion and caring.”
An estimated $2.2 million Australian needs to be raised to build the complex, which will include male and female general wards, an emergency room, operating theatre, maternity ward, laboratory, x-ray room, administration block and learning centre.
The money will also pay for staff housing, an ambulance, work vehicles and pay wages for a “skeleton” crew.
Mr Bosco Odongo is confident the majority of the centre’s experienced doctors, surgeons and nurses would be made up of international volunteers.
Fundraising for the project will begin once a foundation is registered and a board and planning committee are set.
To contact Mr Bosco Odongo call 0417 874 787.
