If you were to fly into a Malawi airport you would spot from above the seemingly countless dirt paths resembling complex spider webs connecting rural villages eventually to a paved road and via that to a district hospital.  Over 80% of Malawi’s people live down dirt paths in villages of varying sizes.  Many villages are several kilometers from pavement.   All are without electricity or motorized vehicles.  Transport – particularly for people with serious health problems – is an enormous and persisting problem.

The photo above shows a woman being transported to a health center.   She rides in a bicycle ambulance, an ordinary bicycle towing a two-wheeled frame with a thin mattress.

When a bicycle ambulance can be found it is the optimal transport for people who are sick – at least during the dry season running from May into October.  When the rains come the dirt turns to mud and the only reliable means of transport is a frustratingly slow ox cart.  Four-wheel drive vehicles like our mobile health clinics can usually negotiate such terrain, but not always.

When after three years we wind up our health education, care, and organizing interventions in a cluster of twenty rural villages, the very minimum that we leave behind are a trained and functioning village health committee and a support group of people living with HIV.  We also continue to pay the school fees of each village’s orphans.  And we leave in the custody of the chief or headman a bicycle ambulance.   One of these costs $200 and it is a god-send to women with distressed labor, or anyone with cerebral malaria, or a person simply unable to walk or be physically carried several kilometers to a health center.

You have helped us a lot with purchasing and distributing these.  They have served very well over several years and helped many people.  The need for them continues.

Many thanks.

William Rankin