Project Umoja Helping the People of Nyamuswa

Nyamuswa is located in Chamuriho ward in Bunda district. It is a capitol of this ward and has its twin sister village called Makongoro. These villages together has a population of about 6000 people. Nyamuswa is located about 15 miles from Butiama which has become a new district. this is a birth place for the first president of Tanzania Mwl Julius Nyerere. If you keep going north, there is the city of Musoma which is about 41 miles from Nyamuswa.

Nyamuswa has been divided into Nyamuswa A and B recently,  so as Makongoro. Most people who live in the area are from  ikizu tribe, they speak kikizu and kiswahili which is a national language. There are people from other tribes which live in the area who also has adopted kikizu. There are Christians and Muslims  who live side by side and others who still follow traditional worship. People of Nyamuswa are very friendly and welcoming.

Many people who live Nyamuswa are peasant farmers, some keep cows but this activity has decreased over the years due to lack of land for grazing and shortage of water (drought). Other people are engaged in small business like selling produce, fruits etc. Majority of people are poor who live on under $ 1 a day. Clean drinking water still a problem, people depend on traditional wells and no tap water. Every Sunday is a market day (mtera) where people from other villages come and bring their product to sell in Nyamuswa.

In Nyamuswa there is a dispensary with 30 beds which provides medical services to the people of Nyamuswa and other villages. It is run by medical staffs who lack proper equipment’s and training  to do their job.  They work very hard in a very difficult environment. Communicable diseases like diarrhea, malaria, HIV/AIDS is a huge problem in this area. Very recently Zinduka (NGO) also has open another small dispensary run by a retired medical assistant  to help people, they charge a fee for their services.

In Nyamuswa area there are two primary school one in Nyamuswa side and another in Makongoro side. There is Makongoro secopdary which has been built by villagers and run with the help of government. There is a small police station to help provide security and a court house. This is Nyamuswa the place I love.

Nyamuswa is a small village in Tanzania. The population of Nyamuswa is about 6000 people. It is located about 20 miles east of lake Victoria. The city of Musoma is 41 miles to the north and to the east there is the great plain of Serengeti. Nyamuswa is located south of Butiama, the birthplace of Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere.

As a small child growing up Nyamuswa, I didn’t understand how poor my country was. We used to go to school without shoes. That was normal as almost all kids in the class didn’t have shoes. After school most of us used to go home to help our parents with house duties. I remember going with my mom to fetch water in a water pond near our house as there was no tap water in the village.

When school closes (during vacation or holidays), many students used that time to sell agricultural produces (fruits, nuts & sugarcanes) to earn money to buy school supplies, school uniforms and sometimes to help their parents with little income they earn.

There was only one health center in Nyamuswa then, this is the only health center in the area. People used to come from other villages to get treatment from this health center. When we used to get sick (mostly malaria), my mother used to take us to the health center, we used to find a lot of people also waiting to get treatment. We used to wait for hours to be seen by the doctor..

I remember one time I climbed to a orange tree to pick oranges, a branch of the tree I was on broke and I fell from the top of the tree. In my way down the another branch caught my leg and I had a big wound as a result of that. My mother took me the center to get stitches, we waited for 2 hours to be seen with a doctor who was still helping other patients. I finally got my stitches and was released to go home. It was the longest wait for me since I was in very severe pain.

With this memories of Nyamuswa and my experinces growing up there plus the love I have for Nyamuswa and its people, I ask you friends to support me in my effort to help the people of Nyamuswa improve provision of health services there. The need if real, patients are sleeping on the floor with no mattresses. The doctors there are working hard to provide healthcare services but they don’t have proper tools and equipments to enable them do their job. The government has limited resources to equip each and every healthcenter in the country.

ASANTE SANA KWA MCHANGO WAKO, MUNGU AKUBARIKI. THANK YOU FOR YOUR DONATION, GOD BLESS YOU.

Water shortage in Tanzania has been a problem for years now, the problem is even bigger in rural villages. According to WHO, one out of six people lack access to safe drinking water  in Tanzania (WHO/UNICEF jmp, 2004). It has been well documented that water shortage has been caused by population growth, high level consumption and climate change which has shrinked the resource of water.

In villages like Nyamuswa where I grew up, water shortage is a big problem especially in dry season. During this time women and children wake up 5 am and walk for long distance to find water. This chronic water shortage ikn my area causes a serious concern to all of us. Study shows in rural Tanzania people walk for 2 to 3 km daily in search of water from public taps where available, or natural streams and carrying heavy containers on their heads aof about 20 to 25 litles per trip.

There is another problem of long lines at the point of water tap or boreholes where people spend hours to wait for their turn. Apart from this stagnating economic activities  in these communities, it is scary if it happent to have any kind of contamination of these water sources, the whole village will be at risk.

The government of Tanzania has acted by decentralizing the water sector, but despite the effort by the government on major reform on the sector since 2002, access to water and sanitation remain low. In rural areas only about 44% of people in 2010 had access of water (ministry of water).

In rural areas, water supply and sanitation are provided by Community Owned Water Supply Organization(COWSOs). They have been established through local government framework of village councils following the adoption of water sector development strategy. This effort has yet to bear fruits anticipated. Many villages in the country still face shortage of clean drinking water. Mothers in rural areas with babies in their back still walk long distances in search of water to use in their daily activities like cooking, washing and drinking.

Water shortage have impct on the wellbeing and economic activities of the community. Water shortage leads to poor sanitation, lack of safe drinking water and overcrowding at water sources. These is a perfect combination for epidemics of infectious diseases like cholera, typhoid and diarrhea. As people spend most of their time to fetch water, other economic activities stall and this is a perfect recipe for poverty. A teacher at Nyamuswa A told me that during the dry season, they see attandance at school drop especially for girls as they help their parent to search water. As we all know, absesnteeism is one of the factor which lead to poor performance at school.

The issue of water shortage can be solved through more water sources, better distribution and less waste of it. We need to develop a know how at the lovcal level, we need to get water technicians to survey at villages to locate areas where safe and clean water can be obtained.

We need to increase and improve financing at local level. NGOs can help in this area as local authority don’t have enough funds located to them from district levels. This will help in distribution by digging more clean water wells in these rural areas.

Evaluation, monitoring and protecting water resources is also very important. When I was growing up in Nyamuswa, there were 3 big sources of water, today only one has remained due to drought and many people farm upstream of these sources. Education is needed in safegurading these natural water sources in the area.

We ask everybody to join in our effort to increase water supply by digging more wells in Nyamuswa area. Let us work together to educate people the importance of building permanent toilets in their household as this will decrease contamination of water sources and decrease transmission of infectious diseases during the rainy seasson. These effort needs money, we ask for your donation. This will make a differnce to people in Nyamuswa area.

In Tanzania, the National health indicators still reflect the poor social economic situation. Maternal and Infant mortality still very high (ministry of Health 2010). The most common health problems is communicable disease and obstetric complications which together accounts over 71% of all hospital visit (Ministry of Health 2009).

Although healthcare in Tanzania has eveolved since the country got independence 1961 where only 12 doctors were Tanzanian, still health care sysytem is facing a lot of challenges especially in villages where health centers are very poor with the most crudes operating room tools.

In order to address the problem of health professionals shortage, the country looked on clinical workers, some with education equivalent to tenth garde in the United states, send them to school. A system has been designed to train people who are less than doctors, less than pharmacist. These clinical officers are taught the top ten infectious diseases like malaria, they become pretty proficient.

When I was in a pharmacy school in University of Dar Es Salaam, there two clinical officers in my class who decided to become pharmacists. They used to tell us the challenges they faced when they were working as clinical officers. They informed us that they used to perform duties and procidures which where supposed to be done with specialists.

Despite their proficiencies, Assistant medical officers (Tanzanian version of physician assistant in the US), faced a daunting odds. By the time patients will little money and no transportation finally makes to the hospital are quite ill, having delayed care, many of whom are pregnant with complications end up dyingin their hands.

In my village Naymuswa health center, there is only one trained medical officer who work mainly as adminstrator. There are too few nurses and too little medical equipments. There is no X-ray machine, no ultrasound machine and a laboratory with only one old microscope! The are just now buliding one operating room. This health center serves tens of patients from Nyamuswa and surrounding village being the only health center in the area.

In the US if you fell ill and you are taken to the hosoital, you are going to meet a doctor. in my village and many villages in my country that is a luxury. A lot of people have gone to their graves without meeting a doctor. For instance in Nyamuswa health center, there are 2 Assistant medical officers who work there on a daily basis, few medical officers are based in Bunda which is 23 km away.

Nyamuswa health center like many health centers in th country needs good diagnostic equipment to make sure those Assistant medical officers diagnose patients very fast and give them right treatment. But, the country is poor and salaries are very low. Many doctors who are posted to work in rural areas close to peolpe quits to work on HIV prevention NGOs and other NGOs where they get paid more. My friend who is a doctor now is working in Mwanza with Malaria NGO which pay him more, he also sighted lack of support staff as a factor of leaving patient care

For all the success Tanzania has with AMOs, their experince can’t always match the knowledge of a medical doctor. Their training is limited, they think of first thing first. Their training is good for what they do, taking care of a patient day to day level, they don’t have time to learn the path of physiology, biochemistry, pathology to really understand the disease as medical student do, they don’t have much time in their training.

With all these challenges rural health centers face, Project Umoja is encouraging people to help improve provision of health care in villages starting with one health center at a time. If we manage to provide medical equipments, diagnostic tools, doctors and AMOs will be better equiped to provide services to patient fast and efficient.  If we increase access to cl;ean drinking water in villages, the rate of transmission of wterborne diseases like cholera, dysentry, typhoid and diarrhea which kill a lot of children will be eliminated. If we help in the effort of training nurses, midwives and other health care support staffs, life of people in villages will be improved. Please give us a hand in anyway you can, together we can succeed.

Tanzania like many poor developing countries has a lot of problems in different sectors, health care is one of those big problem the country has yet to address. I grew up in a village called Nyamuswa in Bunda district and experianced this problem first hand.

There was a health center back then, the same health center with the same buildings still there today.This health center provides medical services to a many people from  Nyamuswa/Makongoro and other villages which don’t have health centers; Sarawe, Marambeka, Bukama, Kiroleli, Kambubu, Salama kati, Salama A to mention a few.

This health center is the only government clinic in the area, its laboratory has only one ill-equipped microscope and the center has a limited supply of medications. Most people (with income under $1 per day) purchase medication directly from local medical stores (Maduka ya dawa baridi) which are run by people with no medical oversight but sells everything from OTC to prescription medications!

Patients from those villages I have mentioned before walk on foot for miles to get to Nyamuswa health center for medical care. When the health center can’t help them because lack of equipments and sometimes expertise, they are refered Bunda which is about 23 km away or Musoma about 51 km away. Remember this health center doesn’t have an ambulance to take them there, it up to the patinets to rent a car there God knows when! Sometimes people have ended up dying because they can’t raise money on a timely manner to rent a car to get to Bunda or Musoma.
ii.Story from Nyamuswa

A pregnant woman delivered a baby at home, after 2 days her stomach began to swell and was in severe pain. She was taken to Nyamuswa health center for treatment. The doctor at the center told her that he couldn’t help her, she needs to get advanced care from Bunda or Musoma. The family didn’t have money to rent a car and since there
is no ambulance at this health caenter to take her to Bunda or Musoma, the woman
remained in pain and her stomach continued to swell to the point where she died 8 days later! Her baby due lack of proper care died after few
months. These deaths could be avoided if there was an ambulance or any kind of
transportation at this dispensary which could have taken her with the baby to Bunda or even Musoma.

This true story from Nyamuswa highlights the needs of medical transportation (an ambulance) in order to have a way to properly deal with emergencies particularly maternity emergencies and accidents. Currently the only way to
transfer a patient to the hospital (Bunda or Musoma) is to rent a car. This
creates three key problems; first of all, it takes long time to get a car because most people are poor, it takes them a while to come up with the money needed to rent a car. Secondly, the car has to follow traffic rules so it can take a long time to reach the hospital Bunda or Musoma hospital particularly in rush hours. Thirdly, a patient cannot be provided care in the rented car.

I take this opportunity to ask friends and fellow with means from Nyamuswa and surrounding villages to join us in the effort to equip this health center with tools and medical equipments. also this dispensary need a form of reliable transportation to take referal patients to Bunda or Musoma. Please visit our website to give us a hand, lets help people of Nyamuswa, together we can make a difference!