How Abuja community survives without health care

Kauna Tanko has been in pain for years. An accident last year made it worse. But she’s never been hospital for any treatment. Her community of Gaye in Kuje area council has none. So when a team of doctors, nurses, pharmacists chanced upon her village, she was among the first few residents to get on […]

Kauna Tanko has been in pain for years. An accident last year made it worse. But she’s never been hospital for any treatment. Her community of Gaye in Kuje area council has none.
So when a team of doctors, nurses, pharmacists chanced upon her village, she was among the first few residents to get on queue.
At least 500 people spent their Saturday on a queue, waiting for medical attention-adults on one line, children on the other-some for the first time in their lives.
The outreach team turned the classrooms of Gaye’s only school into a clinic. Thin mattresses covered in blue hospital gowns were laid out on the floor of two classrooms to serve as admission wards-one for males, the other for females.
Three other classrooms turned into consulting room, a dispensary and a counselling room.
In the last classroom, the team shoved school books aside, pushed desks together to make an operating table, and bunched books under a hospital garments for a head raise. Buckets served as washbins, scrubs draped over the windows gave privacy and a giant torchlight lit the room as the surgeons cut and stitched till 12 am the next day.
Gaye has a lot of pain. Many of its residents, some of them through interpreters, complain about pain in “their waist, hips, from walking and carrying load on their heads,” a doctor on the team explains. “There was no coughing, there was vision problems in the elderly.”
Its farmers spend their day working the land and trekking long distances on foot. And getting any help in there is difficult.
The road thins into sandy patches, then cuts into the forest floor-in some places so deep the tree roots tower overhead. From there, it slides down slopes as steep as a wall, through two running rivers, rumbles up stony hills, drags through sand on a dried-up river bed.
It is all of two hours from Kuje main town. A longer route without as much obstacles takes three hours.
Political campaigns that rumbled into Gaye have long since picked up the votes and disappeared. Medical outreaches are infrequent, but they are a lifeline for even residents from neighbouring communities.
Tersoo Hia, from neighbouring Robokya, was diagnosed with hernia but a surgery was not an option, because of “financial handicap,” he said.
“When I heard it is free medical treatment, I decided to join, so despite the financial problem, I will get assistance,” Hia says.
Much of the work ongoing in Gaye is charity, says Vera Onyeaka-Onyilo, founder of Theovera Foundation, which contributed to the outreach.
“Government should come in and help [Gaye],” she says, hours into joining overwhelmed pharmacists and nurses dispensing drugs to a continuously growing crowd.
“[It] doesn’t a health centre, the schools are in terrible condition and the roads are bad. It is a very hard to reach community. In fact, it is terrible.”
Dr Talemoh Dah, founder of the Soteria-Afrique Rural Health Initiative, first came prospecting after a 45-minute hair-raising ride on a motorbike to Gaye, convinced assistance was needed. Then he and friends mobilised for the outreach.
“We had plans-that we will need a space where we can build a small clinic to help them. And then maybe once a month, we come and fix anything surgical. And those people can be liaising with us by phone,” he says.
Phone signals drop around Gaye, and community health extension workers will have to cross into neighbouring villages to make that phone call.
Brothers Bitrus and Beta Monday are the two lone health extension workers back last year from training school in Zamfara. They scrubbed in on the surgeries on Saturday, and stretchered Hia and other patients from the theatre into “classroom” wards for recovery.
They had to mount intravenous fluid bags on sticks hooked to classroom windows before running the line into the arm of Tanko’s daughter, 5, recovering from complicated malaria. In rough terrain, they are learning to improvise where there is no doctor.
They clerked, monitored and will follow up each patient hospitalised, once the outreach is over, and then report to Soteria’s doctors. They will also be all Gaye can count on in near future when they man a tiny building the community has given over to Soteria for conversion into a health centre.
Soteria has no intention of handing the clinic over to government or community for concerns it could be shut down in event of misunderstanding among community groups.
Tanko doesn’t mind who runs the clinic, if and when one comes to Gaye.