31
Jul
2007
31 - Jul - 2007
Conakry, Guinea Report on activities of DREAM centre
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In recent weeks, the DREAM centre of Conakry has seen a considerable growth in the number of its patients. The good news that the centre exists has started to spread across this poor and tough city. A city wholly built along a rocky ridge that juts right out until the sea, where settlements of shacks and huts have amassed in a haphazard fashion as hundreds of thousands people moved towards the capital (an imposed choice because the land all around is no longer rocky but marshy). An enormously long city, whose last neighbourhood is significantly called km36. |
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The recent increase is especially evident in the number of pregnant women. Some agreements with maternity clinics in Conakry have paved the way for the referral to the DREAM centre of pregnant women who test positive for HIV, so that they will be able to start prevention of vertical transmission of AIDS as soon as possible. Some doctors and nurses of the Guinean army recently started, in the premises of the DREAM centre itself, to undergo a formation course and also to do practical placements, in view of the opening of a service providing antiretroviral treatment in military hospitals of the capital. |
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This is a mark of the hope that the institution vests in DREAM, but it is also, for DREAM, an expression of the desire to contribute to and to accompany the pacification and social and economic rebuilding process which the country is facing, after having overcome the crisis and tensions of the first months of the year. The Guinean people are a people who have suffered much. However, beyond the poverty and degradation enveloping the lives of most of the people, beyond the lack of infrastructures, means and opportunities, in the crooked alleyways that separate the thousands of shacks which practically make up the entire city, in the chaos of the embouteillages that paralyse the streets from Monday to Friday, the people of Conakry anyhow live with exceptional grace and composure, and with the desire to build a new society. The willingness to work to improve the situation of the country may be discerned in many. |
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Guinea has had a difficult history. But every history can find its turning point. DREAM has never contemplated surrendering in the face of difficulties nor has it ever believed that are limitations are invincible, be they cultural or environmental. The programme wants to make an ever deeper impact on the lives of those people who have entrusted themselves to its services, to make their lives less difficult, less weighed down by the burdens posed by an inhuman background. DREAM wants to be a stable point of reference which many men, women and children who desire a different future, may look to. It was in this scenario that health education and nutrition activities undertaken at the centre were recently intensified. |
Ambito
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