Burkina Faso – Maternity Unit Update Building Towards better care for the community

Isaiah 25 : 4 “You have been a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in their distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat”

The Team Visit to Burkina Faso

Objectives For The Trip.

International Needs Burkina Faso La Bonne Nouvelle School has around 200 secondary pupils and recently opened a primary school with 374 new pupils. 10 minutes walk away is the Sante Ophel medical centre with a pharmacy, consultation building and laboratory. In July 15 work began on the new maternity ward to cope with the growing number of babies born every month. With consultations, treatments and maternal care, the whole medical centre serves the community and treats up to 15,000 people per year

Maternity Ward Update

Medical Centre Update Bulletin The maternity build is happening quickly and we were pleased with the progress, some of us got the chance to help out the builders and work with them as they made their own bricks on site and wove the reinforced steel rods together that sit inside the structure. If we can continue the fundraising at the same speed, we will have a completed building before the end of the year. The growth in numbers of babies born over 2015 proved the necessity of this new unit.

Fundraising Update

Visiting local families and sponsored children

Updates In addition to seeing the children in the school, we were able to visit the families in their own homes. This part of the trip for me was the most humbling, seeing first hand the daily struggles that families contend with, fetching water from a well 7 km away and bringing it back for the family to use, struggling with waterborne disease as the sanitation and sewer systems are non existent. The yearly struggle against Malaria is very hard on families especially the very young who will be so much more vulnerable to the parasites. Gastro intestinal problems and Malaria make up 75% of all treatments at the medical centre and the average resident will suffer at least one or two times a year from Malaria. For the members of the team that sponsor children, the experience of meeting their sponsored child face to face and also to meet their families was incredible. The families were so grateful to the sponsors and each sponsor was able to see first hand the impact of their sponsorship. All the sponsored children in Burkina through I.N will get their school fees paid creating opportunities for the children to develop and then access to the medical centre and a doctor if they the sick. This is helping the whole family not just the individual child as education creates opportunities and the medical care can reduce the suffering from simple childhood diseases.

Day trip to the old town of Bobo

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