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Medical professionals seek aid raising funds for hospital in Tanzania

Date: 9/4/2015

SPRINGFIELD – Medical professionals from the Springfield area is seeking the public’s help in raising funds to build a hospital in Tanzania.

Anne Lynch, a registered nurse who is part of the Jambo Tanzania, explained the nonprofit group will be staging two fundraisers for their effort.

There will be the eighth annual Building Blocks of Hope golf tournament on Oct. 19 at the Twin Hills Country Club in Longmeadow, followed by an auction on Oct. 24 at the Colony Club in Springfield.

Lynch explained that activities such as these are the principal ways the group raises funds to buy the supplies and the workers in the village of Gera in Tanzania.

She said the group of medical volunteers goes to Gera for a two week period to tend to the health care needs of the village and the surrounding area. The last trip was 2014.

“We go every other year,” she told Reminder Publications. “We pay our own way so there are no administrative costs.”

Dr. Mary Banda, a hospitalist at Mercy Medical Center, started the effort, Lynch said. Banda is a native of Tanzania who came to this country at age 19 to study. On a trip back to her country when she was in medical school, Banda noticed local schools didn’t have supplies such as desks. She organized a bake sale, raised $2,000 and sent it back to her mother to pay for desks to be made.

In 1998, she started Jambo Tanzania and since then has helped rebuild the primary school in the village as well as establish a clinic.

The nearest hospital is a half hour away, but Lynch said the villagers have little money and no health insurance.

She recounted how Banda diagnosed a child with a congenital heart problem. She took up a collection to send the child and her mother to the hospital where a doctor from Italy took the child there and successful corrected the problems through surgery.

Lynch said the mother comes when the team is there to thanks them with the gift of a live chicken.

There are stories without happy endings and Lynch said, “You get the sad parts but you get the happy parts, too.”

She said villagers will wait for medical treatment for two hours without complaining. The most common problems are high blood pressure, but diabetes, malaria, sexually transmitted diseases and dehydration are also common.     

Lynch noted Dr. Fred Kapinos, a dentist from Chicopee, was among the volunteers in 2014. She wrote in a newsletter,  “He did an extraordinary job. With no electricity and only a generator, he did extractions, root canals and fillings. He fashioned a dental chair with a headrest, suction form a small vacuum and a sterilizer from a pressure cooker. It was fabulous and the people appreciated the work he did. A young girl came in with decay in her front teeth and wouldn’t smile. Dr. Kapinos drilled out the decay and filled the teeth. The girls left the ‘dental office’ smiling. This is just one example of the work that he did. He saw approximately 80 patients in five days.”

For more information on the organization go to http://www.jambotanzania.us.