Abuja’s IDP camps battle diseases

The doctors examined Joshua and prescribed medicine for malaria. Unable to move further, Joshua ended up on his buttocks under a tree. A photograph of him half slumping under a tree in New Kuchingoro, a camp for displaced people in Abuja has become iconic of health care on camps. The camp’s population is close to […]

The doctors examined Joshua and prescribed medicine for malaria. Unable to move further, Joshua ended up on his buttocks under a tree.

A photograph of him half slumping under a tree in New Kuchingoro, a camp for displaced people in Abuja has become iconic of health care on camps.

The camp’s population is close to 2,000.

“It is huge population and problems come up depending on the volume,” says Dr Liman Idris, vice president of Nigerian Medical Association in the FCT, which held its latest outreach for the residents of New Kuchingoro camp.

“There is need to look at them and see if problems are developing and how to solve them.”

The doctors chose New Kuchingoro because it had a semblance of organization, but a preliminary visit to assess the camp’s most pressing needs found communicable diseases, malaria and diarrhoea.

The medication they prescribed was unavailable on camp and had to be bought outside.

Malaria abounds

“Malaria abounds,” says Idris. “Anywhere there is population, water collects here and there and mosquitoes breed.

“A camp is not a regular shelter for humans. It is makeshift. So all the protection one would expect in a built house will not be there. So there is need to always put an eye out for communicable diseases.”

Joshua’s fever had been raging for days, and no one to care for him, his fellow teenagers said on camp.

His father Isuwa pulled him out of him school in Maiduguri, leaving his mother doing security work in the city, Daily Trust learnt.

Isuwa doesn’t live on the camp where he has three other wives; he’s taken up residence with a new wife in Area one, where he works as a mechanic and drives in an expensive car.

Joshua lives on the camp with two brothers, and they have only each other. Days into his fever, he’d had no treatment and no money to get any.

He needed to pay N200 before he could get any drugs from the camp’s clinic.

It took doctors on an outreach to the camp for him to get a prescription.

And it took his brother to queue at the clinic for the drugs while Joshua sat under the tree.

Under another tree across from him, a second boy, shivering with fever, vomits the food he’s managed to take in.

Other residents queue up for drugs. Each will get complementary dose of anti-worm medicine.

“The target is to reach the unreached,” says Dr Jude Achonwa.

Responsibility

Outreaches have always been part of Physicians Week, and have come to symbolize doctors’ biggest corporate social responsibility—taking on underserved communities year after year for just a day of health care.

The outreach targets at least 75% of the camp’s population, residents displaced from their homes in the north east now seeking new lives and shelter in Abuja.

Victoria Friday’s three-year-old son is “sick with chronic malaria,” the woman says. Her elder child, aged seven, too. Both suffer convulsions since birth and living on a camp has only made life difficult.

“Seven years now, I’m dealing with the convulsions. I took them to hospital but I didn’t see any changes,” says Friday, as she escorts her two children from the clinic.

She makes a living selling “masa” (rice cake). Her husband found work only last month and is yet to be paid.

“Right now I want to cook but I don’t have foodstuff. I have to go and borrow beans from a neighbour,” she says.

Beside her, Patricia Dalung is pregnant and worried about getting malaria in her condition. Joshua only wants to get better.