Kabila Health Center

A hundred kilometers south-east of Mwanza is a small town called Kabila, which I have been traveling weekly to its health center for the past month. The journey takes about 1.5 hours by car one-way, with one-third of the trip being on red-dirt roads. Most people living in the area are subsistent farmers.

At Kabila Health Center, I work with Simon, the sole clinical officer for the entire health center. A clinical officer in Tanzania receives only two years of training compared to a medical doctor in Tanzania, who receives 5 years of medical school followed by 1 year of internship. There are many more clinical officers in Tanzania, and they form a large backbone of the health care providers in this country.


Simon is an energetic man in his early forties, who runs around from his examination office to the HIV clinic to the maternity ward seeing patients all everyday. He is the only trained clinical officer in the area, and must carry out all duties from delivering babies to examining the old and sick.


Unfortunately, the health center has no electricity, no lab technician or even a weighing scale for him to provide care. And since the town is quite removed from the nearest district hospital (Magu), the people here know the limitations in health care they are receiving.


When I visit each week, we see patients together in the HIV clinic (sometimes with chickens coming into our exam room). Though Simon is always eager to learn, it is extremely challenging to model good care when it is not possible to weigh patients or run simple labs, like even checking for malaria.

As in most developing countries, like Tanzania, the health care patients receive is disproportionately better in the big cities. Pray that care in the rural parts of Tanzania can improve.