Week Two - Out and About

Yesterday Team Gambia made the long and occasionally arduous journey across to the North Bank of Gambia, via a ferry from Banjul. Our earliest start of the project so far was compounded by having to wait for almost two hours at the terminus to board a ferry. Once on board, however, we climbed to the top deck to enjoy some well-earned breeze for the fifty-minute crossing.

Just a short drive from the North Bank port is the Esau Major Health Centre. Esau Major serves a large rural catchment area and can cater for all but the most serious of health conditions. The centre boasts a large maternal ward which accounts for the majority of its patients, delivering on average three babies a day.

We then travelled further north to visit the Cherno Baba Traditional Healers Association in Berending. The head of the centre and his two senior practitioners offered us a warm welcome, and were happy to answer all of our questions. It was incredibly interesting to hear about their traditional treatment methods and the large number of the North Bank population who still rely on them.

More interesting, however, was how keen the head of the centre was to stress the “progressive collaboration” that exists between themselves and the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital, freely stating that many illnesses cannot be cured by traditional methods alone, and instead require modern medical treatments.

This morning our first visit was to the Brikama Health Centre, though it could perhaps be more accurately described as a district general hospital. The centre runs numerous clinics, including a baby clinic at which any child under the age of five can be weighed and immunised for free. It also has several wards, including paediatrics, separate male and female wards, a labour ward and theatre, and a laboratory for testing.

From Brikama we travelled to Gunjur, to meet three traditional birth attendants operating out of Gunjur, but who serve the large number of rural villages in the Kombo South District. Whilst being specifically focused on maternity and birthing, the birth attendants are committed to women’s health in general, and health practices from a specifically female perspective.

Travelling to different health centres, clinics and organisations is proving extremely helpful in developing the focus of the Swansea-Gambia Link project, as we are seeing first-hand the various methods by which health care is being delivered and accessed by people across Gambia, and furthermore how much health education is already a considerable part of health care here, and yet still such an area for improvement.