Second Ambulance ("Mobile Unit") for Samusocial Peru: USD 15,000

Samusocial Peru is concentrating its efforts in Huaycan, one of the Pueblos Jovenes (poor neighborhoods) that surround the capital, Lima. It operates one mobile unit that goes daily to Huaycan in search of people, mainly children, in need of immediate medical assistance. The children of Huaycan and their families face many medical and psychological problems such as family violence, sexual abuse, alcoholism, depression, and respiratory and intestinal diseases. Malnutrition is an issue for many children. The mobile unit is composed of a social worker, a nurse and a driver. They cruise the neighborhood in order to care for and listen to people in social and medical emergency situations. They organize their actions around three main missions: medical assistance, psychological support and preventive education.

In order for them to double their interventions and to reach parts of Huaycan that they do not know yet, they need a second ambulance. The new team operating the new unit will be (as for the first ambulance) personnel dispatched from the Peruvian Health Ministry and the Municipality of Ate.

The cost of the brand new Peugeot Boxer is USD 15,000.00 (fifteen thousand dollars). It was bought from the Peugeot representative in Lima, Peru.

 

Fight Against Tuberculosis in Huaycan: USD 7,000

This project was financed in late 2006 and execution started in January 2007.

Tuberculosis is widespread in Huaycan. Hundreds of persons (including many children) are already sick or at risk of getting sick. Some children have already died of the disease for lack of proper treatment.
The Peruvian Health Ministry has put in place a program to fight the disease that is working well: It is free, patients come daily to the health center ("Centro de Salud Senor de los Milagros") in Huaycan to take their medicine. They have to take it in front of the nurse. This control is essential: at the start of the program, nurses were just giving the medicines to patients so that they could take them later, at home. They then realized that some patients were throwing the medicines away or reselling them.
The main problem now is that most of the children under treatment are not nourished as they should. Malnutrition weakens the organism and makes treatment much more difficult. Children are lacking proteins in their diet. Malnutrition makes the treatment not effective and the children do not get cured. This can be catastrophic as the children then become "multi-resistant" and thus end up needing a much heavier (and much costlier) treatment.

The project's objective is to reinforce the tuberculosis treatment of the "Centro de Salud Senor de los Milagros" of Huaycan by offering to the children under treatment (and their families) nutritional complements as well as detecting new children with tuberculosis that are not under treatment and convince their parents to bring them to the center for treatment.

All children under treatment will get a protein rich breakfast every  morning when they come to the Center to get their medicine. The breakfast will be had at the Center, not taken away. Specially undernourished patients, adults or children, will receive an additional vitamin supplement. In order to monitor the situation, a nutritionist will follow all the children under treatment by being present at the Center at least once a month. Finally, several information campaign about the disease, its cure and about the Center will be launched by Samusocial Peru in Huaycan. They believe that the quantity of people sick of tuberculosis is much bigger than the group of people actually receiving treatment at the Center. It is still a taboo subject in Huaycan and a lot of people reject treatment. As a result, a lot of children are at risk of dying of a perfectly curable disease. This effort will help identify those children and inform their parents so that they send them to the Center for treatment.

This grant will also finance the creation of a laboratory at the Center allowing for an easier and faster detection of new cases of tuberculosis. The process so far has been to send the samples to Lima for analysis. This can take several weeks. With the new lab precious time will be gained.

As mentioned above, the duration of the program will be six months, and its cost is USD 7,000.00 (seven thousand dollars).