Inspiration from Tanzania

Bethel has had an on-going relationship with Dr. Kristopher Hartwig, an ELCA medical missionary who serves alongside his wife in Tanzania.  His great passion is palliative care.  Last August, Dr. Hartwig and his family visited Bethel for a dinner and conversation about his work in Tanzania.  As was my experience last time he spoke, I was incredibly moved by the work he does and the people whom he has come to know in his ministry. 

Today I received this remarkable update from him and want to share it with you!

 

Dear Friends in Christ,

 

My colleague, Dr. Paul Mmbando, called it a “morphine boom”.  Since working here from 2004, our steady work and advocacy to gain access to oral morphine as a key drug to treat cancer pain has failed to get even one of our rural Lutheran sites to access it.  While our teams have done well enough with what medications they have, it has been a discouragement and, for others, a suffering, that we have not been able to have such a critical medicine.  In late January that all changed.  The director of Matema Lutheran Hospital, Dr. Joseph Mwakilulele, called us while we were on the road doing site visits to announce that he had just left the capital city with a supply of oral morphine.  We were thrilled!  It was a huge effort on his part, and seemed to give us a certain window of opportunity.  A carefully worded email from Paul, showering appreciation here and there, got us more response than we had even hoped for.  By the next week, the Director of the Tanzania Food and Drug Authority (TFDA) was asking for details on what the barriers were to oral morphine in the rural areas.  He then requested that Paul and another colleague, Dr. Elias Muganyizi (Coordinator for the Tanzania Palliative Care Association), come to his office with any other applications for morphine that could be mustered.  Miraculously, within 3 days there were 12 further applications with the requisite photos and signatures, scanned to our emails and presented to the TFDA.  By last week, 13 hospitals were given certificates of permission to stock this drug!  Yet another advocate, Dr. Msemo Diwani of the Ocean Road Cancer Institute, made a teaching week available for each hospital team immediately available.  As for funds to get teams there for training, March is our last month to spend money from our big U.S. government grant, and there is just enough to sponsor all of the travels and trainings.

In the world of Hospice and Palliative Care this is a memorable breakthrough, to put it mildly.  That it would happen with such a collective team effort of Tanzanian professionals is very, very impressive.  My role as a part of that team, even in the background, is one I treasure greatly.  Speaking of treasures, it is another reminder of a rich verse from Isaiah, 45:3 “I will give you treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name.”  For people suffering great pain, relief from that pain is something that is in a secret and inaccessible place for too many people in this world.  That there is the prospect of this one critical aspect of pain relief, now unveiled to so many people, and that it might come in such a way that those same people would indeed know the Lord God, who calls them by name.  Well, that is a true gift of mercy.