Life and work in Mwanza, by Robert Peck, MD
We have seen some amazing things in our first month in Tanzania. Every night we watch from our porch in Mwanza as the sun sets over Lake Victoria in blazing glory.
In the Serengeti we saw a leopard that had dragged an antelope twenty feet up a tree. And every day we observe with envy as our two-year-old learns Swahili with ease.
Still, nothing we’ve seen is more extraordinary than the work performed by the doctors and nurses of Weill Bugando. In the hospital it feels as if each doctor is doing at least five full-time jobs. One of my colleagues, the hospital’s specialist in diabetes and HIV, also serves as the chair of internal medicine for both the hospital and the medical school. On top of these responsibilities, the Tanzanian Ministry for Health regularly requires his services as a consultant.
You have probably heard that the US has more than 100 times as many doctors per capita as Tanzania, but this disparity is only part of the problem. When you work at BMC, you also realize that there is at least 100 times as much disease in Tanzania as there is in the US. The ratio of doctor to disease per capita here is astronomical! And with the rise of the HIV epidemic in Tanzania, the situation is getting worse. Simply put, Tanzania needs more healthcare workers.
Yet I have also seen how, through strategic investment of human and capital resources, Touch is enabling BMC and BUCHS to train a new generation of doctors for Tanzania. The doctors we are educating here will be the future leaders and teachers of medicine in Tanzania, and hopefully throughout Africa. It is our hope that, one day, we will work ourselves out of a job by enabling them to fully take our places. Until then, however, there is still a lot of good work left to be done.