A great story from Malawi.

Mark Visser (also known as The Running Reverend) decided to celebrate his 50th birthday not with a party, but with three grueling days of running and biking more than 160 miles from the CURE Malawi hospital in Blantyre to Cape McClear up on Lake Malawi.  And better yet, he’s doing it all to benefit CURE International.

Mark just finished the last stage of his three-day challenge today, but he’s still accepting donations.   Please go here to learn more about his story.

Congratulations to Mark!

CURE International is known for its excellent medical training programs, and nowhere was that more on display than at the College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa’s (COSECSA) examinations in Rwanda a couple of weeks ago.

COSECSA is an independent body that fosters postgraduate education in surgery and provides standardized surgical training throughout the regions of East, Central and Southern Africa.

At this year’s COSECSA examinations, CURE International’s surgeons and residents made a strong showing:

Dr. Theuri

Dr. Theuri, the assistant medical director at CURE Kenya and former resident at the hospital, passed his fellowship exam and is now a COSECSA fellow. Dr. Theuri also was recognized with a regional gold medal as the outstanding fellow at the examinations.  This is the third year a CURE doctor has won a gold medal!

Dr. Banza

The following CURE residents passed their membership exams: Dr. Banza, an orthopedic surgeon being trained at CURE Malawi, and Drs. Etsub and Tilahun, residents at CURE Kenya.

And last but not least…

Dr. Mbugua, now a 4^th year CURE COSECSA resident at CURE Kenya, was awarded an outstanding student prize while Dr. Baraza, a COSECSA general surgery resident who participated in CURE Kenya’s training program, was given an outstanding member medal.

All in all, the CURE Kenya hospital took home the medals at both the member and fellowship levels as well as the course award.

We send our congratulations to all of these doctors.  We are grateful for their dedication to CURE International and for the amazing work they are doing for children with physical disabilities all over East Africa.

Due to a variety of economic and political factors, there’s currently a fuel crisis in Malawi that has been severely affecting our hospital in the city of Blantyre.

Malawians line up to get fuel

We just received a report from Stuart Palmer, the hospital’s executive director:

The country exists on a hand to mouth basis, or diesel to jerry can, if you will.  As a tanker comes to a filling station or is rumored to be coming, the station is besieged with vehicles and people with jerry cans waiting to fill up.

The government has announced fuel rationing and no more filling of jerry cans. This is a problem for the hospital and for people who need to keep generators going.  The electricity supply is very unreliable so we cannot operate the hospital safely without diesel generator back up.

To manage the crisis, we are conserving fuel as much as we can. Staff who can, including myself, now cycle everywhere to ensure that our fuel lasts as long as we can stretch it.  Every day we send out teams of staff with jerry cans and letters of authority from the hospital to hunt for gasoline. So far for the last three days, like the raven that Noah sent out from the ark, they have returned empty handed.

We have purchased additional food supplies for the hospital so that we can keep running for a number of weeks (including  buying just local vegetables) in case the shortage of foreign exchange stops more suppliers from sending goods to Malawi.

Morale remains high, and most people are still full of good cheer in the run up to Christmas.  This morning we took two of our patients to an international primary school assembly close to the hospital. The school council had asked all the children to bring in gifts for our patients for this season.

The two children being treated for burn contractures whom we took along to receive the gifts on behalf of the hospital were named Tiyamike (which means let’s give thanks) and Mavuto (which means troubles).

Their names are a reminder to us all to continually give thanks to our Heavenly Father for all that we have, regardless of the troubles we see around us.

Here in the hospital, we pray that staff can continue to get to work even when there are not many minibuses running, that patients can still get to us for their operations and that suppliers can still get enough foreign exchange to buy imported medical supplies that we need to keep running.

Please keep the Malawi hospital in your prayers.