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Reports of Andrew Plant as he travels with Dr. Sue Wilson and two of her colleagues from the Tumaini Fund:

Wednesday 1st February

Speaking to Adrian Gidney on Morning Report at 8.40am

Yesterday we struggled to get through the border, they made it very difficult for us. But we have got through and once we reached the Tanzanian side things got a lot easier and a lot friendlier.

We’ve got to the village that we are staying in. It’s very rural and we’re staying in an open apartment with a corrugated roof, but it’s quite clean, there are mosquito nets and lots of mosquitoes and we’re just having a look round.

We’ve been getting to speak to some of the locals, a lot of them have English as a third language and so it is possible to communicate with quite a few of them. They showed us how they live and spent the day getting to know the area.

This morning we’ve come to the district hospital which is responsible for more than three hundred thousand people and it’s just got a single Doctor.

Sue Wilson's Diary

It is Murgwanza hospital and Douglas, my husband who is also a GP in the Island, and I worked here in 2001 so it’s like coming home again.

It’s a lovely place to work but you have to have an idea of the problems here. This is a District General Hospital serving 300,000 people and there is one doctor serving all the people here.

You can imagine it’s quite a busy place. There are clinical assistants who help the doctor. They are really more like resident house officers but they have never had medical training but they can admit people to hospital, give them drugs, set up drips and they’re actually excellent. But they really are working against all odds here but working really hard

It’s a 200 bed hospital with surgical facilities. Basically as soon as doctors in Tanzania qualify from medical school they go out to work in hospital and are immediately in charge of operating so somebody who wouldn’t be trained for surgery or hasn’t been trained as a GP would come out here and start doing operations.

When we were working here there wasn’t an anaesthetist so operations were done under valium, or giving an epidural, a spinal injection. But it is all that can be offered, there isn’t anything else.

The people here are lovely, there very patient, they’re really good patients (just like my patients in Guernsey!). They’re wonderful people but it would be so much better if they had so much more going for them. Surely with the world’s resources in this day and age we can offer the people better than they are receiving now.

I was working in the women’s ward in the labour suite with all the deliveries going on and we reckon that one in three women of a child bearing age had HIV. So one in three patients we were attending had HIV and would go on to develop AIDS.

That means one in three families were going to be orphaned and that’s where the work that I am doing out here and the work of Tumaini, which so many people in Guernsey have supported, is looking after these people.

We launched the orphan sponsorship on the 1st of December and when I come back to Guernsey that’s what I’m going to work really hard at. When I get back from here I am always really full of enthusiasm again once I see how people are having to live here, it makes me burn the midnight oil at home and get on with the work at home.

At the moment we’ve got about 4,000 orphans supported almost entirely from Guernsey, who’ve been supported on an ad hoc basis.

The biggest killer of children in Sub Saharan Africa is Malaria so all these children get a mosquito net, they can sleep under it at night and hopefully not die during childhood.

They get two sets of clothes because they are often only wearing the dirty t-shirt they’re standing up in.

They get a set of school uniform and books and pencils because primary schooling is free in Tanzania but you have to have books and pencils and school uniform and these children and their families haven’t the resources to purchase them.

All the Tumaini orphans have either got all these things or are in the process of receiving them. We believe there are about 200,000 orphans in this area, Kagera which is about the size of Northern Ireland, and the plan is to get help to each one.

There’s no point just doing one or two, or just doing a village here and a village there. We’re aiming to help all the orphans in this area and get child sponsorship for these children so that people in Guernsey and the UK can sponsor them. It will cost a pound a week to feed, clothe and educate one of these children and it will support them until they leave school.

People in this area are dying of starvation right now. I didn’t realise but the rains failed. The rains that should have come in October/November last year failed and everyone’s food is running out.

Andrew, myself and another colleague are going to be travelling up into the North of the Region later on this week and we are going to be seeing people that are starving.

Tumaini means Hope and we are bringing hope. There are no other agencies working here. It is a very provincial place here and very little happens so it could be hopeless.

A couple of years ago we saved a child’s sight for 32p. We bought some antibiotics for this little girls eyes and if we hadn’t turned up that day this little girl would have gone blind. If somebody in Guernsey can give 32p and save a little girls sight, there is so much that can be done here with so little money and in fact the people of Guernsey have been so generous as always.

I can’t tell you the benefit the people are getting from even the smallest donation.

Listen in

Their journey will be covered on BBC Radio Guernsey on Morning Report each day between 30th January and 9th February at 8.40am and you'll be able to read a diary account here.