Madagascar 2017: 20 September – 13 October

On September 20th Annamaria and Salvatore left Turin to carry out refresher courses as part of the project to support school activities, while on September 23rd Cristina, pediatricia, Mara, nurse, and myself left from Rome for the health project. Annamaria and Salvatore carried out both the advanced course for primary and secondary school teachers and headmasters selected in the previous courses, and the first course for health workers (nurses, midwives, headmasters) focused on taking care of patients. A total of about 50 people, including teachers and health workers, attended the course and were given a certificate of attendance at the end of each course. Some of the teachers selected during the courses will be called to teach in the college we are building in the city of Toliara. Healthcare activities were instead focused on medical visits both in hospitals and in some towns and villages located about 130 km from Toliara, along the road to Tolagnaro, the ancient Fort Dauphin, a port town on the Indian Ocean. To cover the 120 kilometers that separate Toliara from Bezaha, one of the centers where we made visits, we spent about five hours of extremely tiring journey on board of an off-road vehicle, along 70 kilometers of disastrous track. We also performed 15 surgeries, some of which were very interesting for the type of pathology we found. Specifically, we operated on a girl suffering from a mycethem (chronic infection of fungal or bacterial origin) a pathology known as “Madura’s foot“, which can cause extensive damage that can also lead to amputation of limbs, as happened in another case we operated on in Burundi in 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also operated on two patients with inveterate femur fracture, a patient with a femur fracture in pseudoarthrosis and a patient with a leg fracture; we removed some painful neurofibromatosis from a 25-year-old girl suffering from Rechlingausen neurofibromatosis and removed a supernumerary thumb from a one-year-old child. We finally corrected a club-foot to two children and removed some large keloids from a girl, as well as other minor procedures.
As always, the Foundation took over the costs of transport and hospitalization of the destitute patients.