This Hospital is Their Only Hope

Help Get Medicine to People in Need

Medicine is crucial to saving lives, and especially at St. Theresa Hospital in Nzara, where no other critical care facility exists for hundreds of miles. But now this place of hope, the only option for thousands of people, is running dangerously short of medicine.

Sarah, a volunteer nurse, remembers when there was no modern maternity ward in Nzara to help mothers and babies in distress. Without incubators, oxygen, or batteries beyond the solar powered ones that lasted only two to three hours, a newborn’s survival depended heavily on the weather.

“If it were a sunny, warm day, the baby might stay warm enough to survive,” she said. If it were cold and overcast, there would be no incubators or oxygen. If the baby needed antibiotics, there may not be refrigeration to preserve the vital medicines.

Defying the statistics. With good health care from St. Theresa,
she can beat the odds of not surviving to her fifth birthday.

Sarah describes the hopeless feeling of having to disconnect a small newborn baby boy when his oxygen ran out. “I had to place him into his mother’s arms. His precious life lasted a little under three hours after that.” Too often she was forced to wrap tiny babies in blankets that would become their burial shrouds.

But that was before.

When St. Theresa Hospital in Nzara entered the picture with modern capabilities, everything changed.

Improving Lives and Medical Care

Sarah contrasts that sober memory with the story of a mother who came in with a difficult labor to St. Theresa’s new maternity ward. The mother delivered shortly after arriving, but her baby wasn’t breathing. This time, Sarah and a midwife were able to bring the baby to the resuscitation table and immediately administer critical care.

“I heard the baby’s family start fervently praying,” she said, as they worked on the newborn and her little body slowly turned from blue to pink. “Suddenly she took a massive breath and let out a loud cry. Her aunt and grandmother collapsed in complete shock and awe at the sound. The family all started crying in thanksgiving.”

Sarah explained, “Until now, families in this situation expected the baby to pass away. Now they have hope that their little one can survive.”

No woman should give birth on a dirt floor. St. Theresa’s maternity ward saves lives.

No Other Place to Go

St. Theresa Hospital in Nzara is that place of hope for more than 300,000 people in a population extending from South Sudan to the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. Every year, 20,000 patients receive medical care here who wouldn’t get that help otherwise.

In modernized countries, it’s difficult to fathom having no critical care facilities to turn to when sickness or emergency strikes. In underserved areas where we work, it is far too common a tragedy.

FAST FACTS ON ST. THERESA HOSPITAL NZARA

Serves an area of over
300,000 people

Treats 20,000
patients a year

Only facility for hundreds of miles for critical care

Because of the generosity and commitment of donors like you, St. Theresa can offer facilities like an operating theater for surgeries, X-ray diagnostics, a maternity ward that can perform emergency C-sections and host critical care for preemies, and a children’s ward.

Thousands come for many miles to have surgery here. Turning them away for lack of medicine is heartbreaking.

Medicine Running Out

But now escalating conflict and unrest in Western Equatoria jeopardizes the work of St. Theresa Hospital.  A violent uprising is displacing thousands in that region, turning families into refugees in an instant. With so many traversing the distance to get help, the hospital finds itself facing a massive increase of incoming patients.

Along with it, a sudden overwhelming demand on the hospital’s stores of medicine.The developing scenario means supplies of medicine at St. Theresa are rapidly depleting. The hospital fears having to watch innocent lives slip away because the resources needed to save them aren’t available.

The hospital can offer little without anesthesia for surgeries, critical drugs for emergencies, antibiotics to stop infections, antimalarials and other drugs vital to halting endemic diseases. Treatable, preventable deaths. But only with the tools to stop them.

Our supporters have long stood with us to supply facilities like St. Theresa Hospital with the resources needed to continue being places of hope – where people can find the help that should be there for every family in need.

Even now, most of the few state hospitals funded by the government have shut down, insufficiently staffed and resourced, leaving St. Theresa as the only light for mothers in labor, children who are sick, fathers who’ve been injured, or families victimized in the recent violence.

You give hope. Our partners’ support means the difference between tragedy
and joy for families who find help at St. Theresa.

Your gift will send medicine to ensure St. Theresa Hospital can continue to shine its lifesaving help to people in urgent need of care.  The hospital is fully dependent on charitable support, and can’t help others without your partnership. 

Please help St. Theresa Hospital have the resources needed to continue to save lives. In this part of South Sudan, there is no other hope.

Sincerely,

Neil A. Corkery President