Karibu Tengeru Hospital

Karibu (Welcome) to Tengeru Hospital!

Tengeru Hospital, a rural government hospital in Arusha, Tanzania, welcomed me and my uncle as volunteers during our stay.  The staff strive to deliver a high level of care, but they are limited by poor funding and equipment.  Please help me say thank you by contributing what you can to this fund, which will be used to purchase needed medical equipment.


I will be managing the money and will use it to purchase items on Amazon that can be shipped directly to hospital staff.  Some larger and more specialized items will be sourced locally through Agape Volunteers (agape-volunteers.com ), the British nonprofit organization that placed us at Tengeru.  Feel free to earmark your gift for a particular item listed below if something inspires you, and I will try to make sure that it is used for the item in question.

After listening to public broadcasting fundraisers for my entire life, I am excited to offer some thank you gifts for various levels of sponsorship:

All donors will have their names published in the thank you section of the blog (theoccasionallymagnificentseven.com ).

$100 and up: Your picture and a profile story about you will be published in the thank you section of the blog.

$200-249: You will receive a postcard from a member of The Occasionally Magnificent Seven.

$250-499: Libbey and Rowena will dance to song of your choice and a video will be posted on the blog.

$500 and up: Special Tanzanian gift shipped to you!

$750-999: A video of the entire family doing a silly activity of your choice will be posted to the blog.

$1000 and up: I will write a complete blog post on the topic of your choice.

Here are some of the items I am hoping to purchase:


STETHOSCOPES ($250, 5 needed)

The doctors at Tengeru are managing medically complex patients with heart and lung disease, but usiually without the benefit of ECGs, chest x-rays, or echocardiograms.  While for some American doctors a stethoscope may be little more than identification, at Tengeru, it is a critical piece of diagnostic equipment.  The doctors I worked with had, at best, the equivalent of the flimsy plastic disposable stethoscopes dispensed in the medication room of my ER.  Some of these doctors took time out of their day to teach, translate, and explain to me what was going on at Tengeru, and I'd like to thank them by proving them with top quality stethoscopes.


TRAUMA SHEARS ($6, 10 needed)

Outside of the sterile packs for procedures and the operating room, there are surprisingly few scissors available to staff for the myriad things they do requiring cutting, including removing casts and bandages and cutting up bulk gauze into appropriately-sized individual pieces.  Most of this is currently done with a razor or scalpel blade without a handle.  Staff are surprisingly skilled with a bare blade, but I would love to send them some proper trauma shears to get their work done a bit more safely and efficiently.


CAST SPLITTER/SPREADER ($30, 1 needed)

I spent more than a week working in the minor procedure are at Tengeru, termed the "Minor Theatre" in British style.  In addition to dealing with wounds and abscesses, Minor Theatre  sees a parade of fractures needing plaster casts or splints and casts and splints needing removal.  They have a well-functioning case saw, but after the cast is cut, the staff have to pry it open with  their  fingers or a pair of scissors.  A proper cast spreader will streamline the process for just $65.  I promise they'll use it  at least 10 times a day.


LIGHTBOX FOR X-RAY VIEWING  ($100, 1 needed)


A common scene in the Minor Theatre, a provider holding up an elbow x-ray to the light from the window.  There seems to be an overabundance of pediatric supracondylar fractures, I suspect due to suboptimal nutrition.  This one is a bit complicated.  It would be nice if we had a smoother and more consistent light source for illuminating x-rays for interpretation.  A simple wall-mounted lightbox would achieve this. 


GOOSE-NECK FLOOR LAMPS ($400, 2 needed)

The doctors at Minor Theatre sew up some pretty nasty and complex wounds.  Sadly, lighting is poor (think a couple of naked bulbs in the ceiling), which does not help their efforts.  Across the way in the maternity ward, same problem, except the complex tears being sewn up are inside women's vaginas.  Other visiting volunteers and I stood there holding our iPhone lights on the procedure (I hope the ladies did not think we were taking videos), but I'm not  sure how  the midwives manage at 3am, when the iPhones are gone as is the paltry additional light coming through the windows.  I would like to donate a couple of medical floor lamps for use in Maternity and Minor Theatre.


GLUCOMETERS  ($20 each, 4 needed)

A rapid blood glucose (sugar) measurement is absolutely necessary in the evaluation and treatment of diabetics and premature infants.  Tengeru has a diabetes clinic, a neonatal unit, and needs blood glucose measurements on many of the patients in the Male, Female, and Maternity Wards.  The staff often find themselves running around the campus in an effort to find a working device or making due without.  This is a simple and inexpensive item but can mean life or death to a hypoglycemic newborn, someone who has overdosed on insulin, or a pregnant woman with new onset diabetes.


BLOOD PRESSURE CUFFS ($40, 3 needed)

Most of the inpatient  wards usually have one blood pressure cuff available to measure routine vital signs.  Most of them.  Usually.  Except when they break or malfunction.


PULSE OXIMETERS ($350, 2 needed)

This device for measuring the oxygen content of blood will be particularly critical as COVID-19 hits Tengeru.  But even now, these devices are being shared between young children with infectious respiratory diseases, newborn preemies, and adults with TB or AIDS-related lung infections.


PHOTOTHERAPY DEVICE ($3000, 1 needed)

Neonatal jaundice, with the risk of permanent brain damage, is relatively common at Tengeru.  Unfortunately, they lack the simple device for treating this condition, a phototherapy lamp.  Mothers are asked to bring the babies outside and expose them to sunlight, but this is not possible for the premature newborns.


OXYGEN CONCENTRATOR ($1000, 1 needed)

In American hospitals, oxygen flows from a tap on the wall.  If a patient needs to be transported to another room or via ambulance, they travel with a tank of oxygen.  Tengeru has neither of these options, but instead uses portable oxygen concentrators, which extract pure oxygen from the air we breathe and deliver that to the patient.  Unfortunately, the hospital has few of these units, so they are rationed to the patients with the highest need and/or traded back and forth between patients, exposing everyone to infection, in particular the premature newborns and immunocompromised patients.


This is the storeroom where they keep broken equipment, in hopes that it can be fixed or at least provide spare parts.  You can see an oxygen concentrator toward the back of the central clearing.  My uncle Mark was able to do battle with one of these and get it working again, but the hospital is still desperately in need of more.

So, I hope you can help me help Tengeru.  I can't even begin to imagine how they are going to manage when and if Tanzania ends up with a lot of COVID-19 cases.  Well, yes I can.  They'll continue working hard and doing as much as they can for their patients with what little they have.