Community Health Program

Hi there,

My name is Jono Macleod, my wife Destinee and I are NZ doctors helping run a Maternal Child Health program in rural South Sudan.

Each year our clinic sees over 15,000 woman and children from the villages surrounding our town of Tonj. While this work is very rewarding, it can also be heartbreaking knowing that so much of the suffering we see could be prevented with simple preventative health measures. For example we currently have a measles outbreak in our region due to very low vaccination rates, and last week we tragically had our first death from measles in our clinic. We frequently hear of children dying in the community from dehydration, malaria and pneumonia. According to UNICEF in South Sudan 1 in 7 children die before the age of 5years - we want to do our part in trying to reverse this horrific statistic.

In 2012 Destinee and I finished our masters of Public Health & Tropical Medicine. Now my dream is to put that training into use by helping to start a community health program here in the Tonj region. The program utilises teams of community health promotors, who are local volunteers that we train from surrounding villages. We train these community health promotors to visit their neighbours in their homes and teach village weekly health lessons on key topics such as hand washing, using a mosquito net, birth care, safe drinking water, vaccination, use of ORS for diarrhoea, and many more. This program has been used successfully in many other African nations, and we believe it has the potential to make a huge difference to our remote area of South Sudan as well.

‘Kiwis for South Sudan’ are generously trying to fundraise $7500 to help fund the first 6 months of this program. This money will cover salaries of program staff, transport costs, training workshops, and hiring a medical officer to cover me for a few months in the clinic, which will free me up to be working out in the villages.

Would you be willing to help make this dream happen?