Update from Zimbabwe: SOS helps cholera patients

Mr Aaron Mukwirimba, the SOS Vocational Training Centre co-ordinator, has reported that by the end of 14 January, eleven cases of cholera had been treated at the medical centre set up at the SOS Technical and Vocational Training Centre in Shamva near Bindura. All but four of these cases have been treated and discharged since the centre was set up on Tuesday.

A lady of about 70 who came to the centre yesterday and was treated overnight, has now fully recovered and was discharged this morning. "I was very close to death when I came here", the lady commented on discharge. An infant and two other patients were also discharged this morning.

Mr Mukwirimba advised that news had reached him of six deaths that had occurred on neighbouring farms before the treatment centre had been established at the centre. The victims had not been able to make it in time to the main Bindura treatment centre.

SOS Children's Villages Zimbabwe are keen to offer assistance to farm workers on neighbouring farms within a three to four kilometre radius of the SOS Maizelands farm.

The Director of SOS Children Zimabwe, Gary Birditt says: "As our organisation is part of the farming community in Shamva we are well placed to facilitate distribution of emergency relief items to our neighbours. We are assisting in this way without necessarily running our own emergency relief programme. We plan to operate in the same way that we have penetrated urban communities through our SOS Social Centres and Family Strengthening Programmes; by partnering with the relevant government bodies and UNICEF and delivering UNICEF emergency relief items to those farm workers who we are able to identify. Furthermore some of our neighbours in Shamva are re-settlers who have acquired small plots of land through the government's land reform programme. They do not have the capacity to respond to the outbreak of cholera", he added.

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