Our colleague Edmund Munubi, the Director of the TANWAT Hospital, visited Canadian partners of Highlands Hope Umbrella in June. He did a study visit to the Jeffery Hale Hospital in Quebec City where he was impressed by its programming for seniors, including its innovative day centre. He returned to Njombe with an intention to create similar services and today he writes:

Dear Friends,

Its my hope that your all fine and this mail finds you well! It has been a long time since we communicated but its time I break the silence.

Yesterday 03/08/2012 was our biggest day at Tanwat it will go to memory that we opened our Day center for the seniors at Tanwat Hospital.

Its unfortunately time is running so first that i have not completed all the paper work because i had to involve one or two colleagues at the Hospital,second we had thought that we should make a simple survey for the same,but unfortunately fund became a challenge,thus we had to wait for the right time when we could have the resources,time was not on us.

Betty Liduke who is our hospital CTC coordinator being a genius she used the peer educators to spread the word to our village about the day center and mentioned that we would meet the seniors who would be interested with the center at Tanwat Hospital on 03/08/2012.

We had expected to get at most 10 seniors from Kibena our local village to begin with, but we were caught unguarded and the surprise hit us, 47 senors turned out on the first day and before time, most of them brought by their grand children.

Today 6/8/2012 is our second day from noon to 3pm,we identified some seneors with eyes problems hypertension and heart.Thank to our Dr Raymond and Betty Liduke who gave their time and money to ensure things run for first day.

But based on resource limits I estate to mention that instead of 8 visit per month we are going to have only 2 visits until when we will be well organized.

Thanks to all who inspired this dream.God bless you.I will be sending you pictures soon.

Regards,
Edmund J M