GG Final Update

As some of you are no doubt aware I am leaving Tanzania and Trans Tanz, at the end of September. It has been a challenging but rewarding two years during which we have managed to help over 250 patients access health care services for HIV/AIDS. Without our work and your support there is no doubt that a large number of these patients would no longer be with us, leaving broken families and communities behind.

We are still a small organisation but the plans have been put in place for our continuation after I leave. We have employed a highly capable Tanzanian Project Manager, Rosemary Sokile, hired office space and formalised our relationships with our partner organisations in anticipation of a successful funding application to provide mobile testing and treatment of HIV in rural Tanzania.

This expansion and the simultaneous drop in funding has hit our plans hard however. With less money available in the UK there is a chance that we will not be able to continue with our work due to lack of funds. This would be tragedy, both for the patients we support, most of whom would not be able to access treatment and would therefore die more quickly than if they had not started the treatment in the first place, and for the organisation which has made really strong progress in establishing itself over the last couple of years.

Trans Tanz has a budget per year of just £13,000, most of which goes directly to supporting patients (and definitely not into over paid charity workers’ pockets), any amount you can give on a one off or regular basis will really help us get through this transition and emerge stronger in 2010. If you’re doing any running/swimming/dancing etc over the next few months please consider us as a recipient. You could do a lot worse.

There will be a ‘fun’draiser on Dec 5th in London to which everyone is invited to attend. (Check the website for details)

Please if you haven’t already done so, pledge as much as you can spare by visiting the website and donating through Global Giving.

Pictures:

• Rosemary outside the new office (JPG)

Trans Tanz’s work continues week-in and week-out to help over a hundred HIV patients living in rural villages in Bagamoyo district, Tanzania to regularly access the treatment they need to survive.

In the last few months we have helped to identify and refer twelve new HIV patients who are now registered and receiving treatment regularly. Four of these patients are living in villages to which Trans Tanz has only recently expanded, as news of our service spreads and demand grows. Two of these villages, Mashala and Stamico have no access to public transport at all. Without our service, weak and immuno-compromised HIV patients, would face the choice of either walking the 10-15kms to the main road, and paying up to three days wages for the overcrowded public bus, or dying without being able to access free treatment.

This, for many presents too much of a challenge to commit to attending a regular monthly appointment to receive medication in a clinic up to 60km away. By supporting our service you are helping to provide door-to-door transport, social support, food and clean water for over a hundred vulnerable HIV patients, many of whom are women, supporting families by themselves after their partners have died.

One of our first patients, Regina Mtego, who can be seen in the attachment, started using the service over a year ago and recounted to me recently, how the service has changed and expanded in her village:

“At that time (in November 2007) the nearest Care and Treatment Centre (CTC) for HIV was in Chalinze (90km away) and so I couldn’t afford to travel there to get treatment. I was very happy when Trans Tanz started the service and I was one of the three patients from Mkange (a small village just outside the Saadani national park) to use the service when it first started. Now there are eight of us who use the service regularly.’’

“We are helping to stop other people contracting HIV by being open about our HIV status and changing attitudes in our village.”

Without your support Regina would probably not be alive today to help fight the disease in her village, so thank you so much for your support. By keeping our patients alive you are helping to keep families together and giving the next generation of Tanzanians the chance of a better childhood.

Please let me know any comments or suggestions on the updates or the project in the comments section. Thanks again for reading and for your support,

Duncan Skelton
Project Manager
Trans Tanz
16/2/09

Pictures:

• Regina Mtego (JPG)

Hi again, thanks for reading and keeping up with Trans Tanz.

Our pilot project in Bagamoyo district in Tanzania continues with new people using the bus-service to access treatment for HIV each week. The patients who use the service are without exception quite poor and face many struggles each day, just to survive. In rural villages throughout Africa opportunities are scarce. Education, employment and access to good quality health care are limited. Being HIV positive multiplies the difficulties people must face in their daily lives. If you are too ill to work, dependant on others for your food and accommodation and stigmatised for being HIV positive, an already difficult life becomes even more gruelling.

I admire our patients for having the courage to come forward and use the bus service, despite the added problems it may bring in the short-term. Anti-retroviral Therapy (ART) is not an easy regimen to maintain. For example, one of our patients, from Saadani on the very traditional and conservative Swahili coast, arrived at the hospital with what, to the untrained eye (i.e. mine) appeared to be third degree burns covering her entire body. She was in a great deal of pain. It turned out that the skin condition was a bad reaction to one of the drugs provided, Septrin. Without our service she would not have been able to get to the hospital on public transport due to here lack of mobility and skin condition and would not have recovered to the extent that she has this week.

Added to the problems caused by side-effects of the treatment regimen, are the problems many patients face in looking after their family, earning money and getting sufficient nutrients to allow the ART to work. They are the bravest people I have ever come across. Trans Tanz is making accessing treatment easier for hundreds of people in Bagamoyo and therefore helping to keep people alive, families together and give people living with HIV a chance at a more normal life. While the patients we help have a difficult life, we are helping to make it a bit easier by removing one of the barriers to staying alive and healthy.

Thanks for reading and your support,
Best wishes,

Duncan Skelton
Project Manager

Pictures:

• One of our younger patients (JPG)

Hi there, this is the first update from the field for Trans Tanz. As you may have seen from the organisational profile, Trans Tanz is primarily concerned with increasing access to treatment for HIV for the large rural population of Bagamoyo district in Tanzania. Our free bus service visits ten villages regularly to take patients for their scheduled appointments to refill their Anti-Retroviral Treatment (ART) but is also used to generally strengthen the response to HIV by increasing the mobility of our partners in Bagamoyo.

We are in our tenth months of service in Bagamoyo district and thus far the project has been very successful, helping over 200 patients gain access to ART and treatment for opportunistic infections and significantly reducing the number of patients who discontinue treatment for financial reasons.

Two weeks ago UKUN, our local partners who provide Home Based Care (HBC), took our bus out on a mobile Voluntary Counselling and Testing trip where they tested over one hundred patients in the area in which we work, identifying ten new patients who will benefit from HBC provided by UKUN and access to treatment provided by Trans Tanz. Due to initiatives such as these the numbers of patients using the bus is growing every week and we are close to capacity on every trip.

Patients also use the service to access treatment for opportunistic infections which occur frequently in immuno-compromised patients. In many cases the bus is literally a lifesaver. Patients are often too weak and sick even to arrive at the village meeting points meaning the bus will visit their home and they will be assisted on the trip by our HBC volunteer.


Last week there was an example of just how necessary your support is to many of these very sick patients. One of our regular passengers had requested a home pick-up due to his failing health. When he arrived at the Care and Treatment Centre (CTC) he was admitted for observation and treatment. Due to a lack of resources in Tanzanian hospitals, the quality of care is generally low; patients are given only small amounts of very basic food stuffs which are often indigestible or unsuitable for HIV patients. So, as part of our commitment to our patients, we provided some suitable food and drinking water to help sustain him during his stay in hospital until we alerted his family of his admission, so that they were able to visit and support him. The following week he was sufficiently recovered to return home with the bus. Without our service he would almost certainly have died at home due to a lack of transport options and if not, subsequently, due to a lack of suitable food.

These are just two examples of ways in which access to transport provided by Trans Tanz is improving the ability of people in Bagamoyo to deal with the devastating effects of HIV and AIDS in their communities. With your help we will be able to continue our work in Bagamoyo as well as introducing new, innovative projects to the rest of the region in the near future. Thanks for your support, from Trans Tanz and all of our patients.

Duncan Skelton
Project Manager
Trans Tanz
12/10/2008

Pictures:

• UKUN counsellor performs VCT in a home in Bagamoyo district (JPG)

Trans Tanz is excited to be involved in Global Giving's Access to Health Campaign 2008. Limited Access to Health has provided the foundation for our work, and we feel a raised awareness and support for new innovative ideas in increasing access is integral to individual's standard of living around the world.

The bus that Trans Tanz runs is only one idea in which we can increase people's access to badly needed services. Over the next few months, however, Trans Tanz will be exploring more cost-effective and efficient ways in which we can deliver access and improve the lives of the communities we work with.

We will post these updates as developments occur. Updates will also be available on our website www.transtanz.org. In the meantime, thank you for your continued support.