Every human being has basic needs – health is one of them.

In each and every one of our project villages, no matter if in India or in Nepal, people suffer from health problems. During our daily work, we see countless examples of this: children, women and men die from high fever, Malaria, AIDS or other diseases because they have no access to medical care and the previous arrangements were not sufficient. This means years of suffering for children or adults, without a diagnosis or treatment, while their relatives have to stand by. These families are poor and/or live in a region with no access to medical care. Some regions are very remote so that they are hard to get to, Malaria-stricken and/or in the hands of Naxalites (a split group of a communist movement that rules with violence in the form of attacks, threats and murder).

For safety reasons, no doctors want to offer their services in such areas in the long run. Getting to a hospital requires days of travelling, and these journeys are difficult to manage, either because of financial issues or because of the condition of the patient. If parents decide to travel to the hospitals with their children against all odds, it is sometimes too late. In many cases, the only diagnosis is an advanced disease that cannot be cured anymore or leads to death. In our projects, we were faced with such situations again and again, and that is why we decided to take action.

The project

In all our project villages in India and Nepal, we offer free medical examinations and treatments, combined with educational work regarding hygiene as well as disease prevention. The respective offers are adapted individually to the different situations in the villages and validated on a regular basis. If necessary, we send our patients to the hospital or give them the possibility to take other offers, for example a supporting therapy for disabled children. Children, women and men benefit equally from our projects.

In order to support other villages without access to medical care, we expanded our project. Once a month, we travel to one of these villages with our team and a local doctor to offer free examination as well as treatment to all villagers. Many people we meet are seriously ill and live with their disease day after day without receiving treatment. An example from one of these villages: we examined 60 people and 14 of them suffered from Malaria.

In addition to the medical care, we want to look after the seriously-ill children we often meet in hospitals. We not only care about the physical well-being, but also about the souls of these little creatures. In a very primitive state hospital in the city of Berhampur, we started the programme ‘Mission for a smile‘. We are there every Sunday to paint and talk to the children and their parents as well as to tell them stories. Sometimes we can send some of them to other doctors, which allows a more effective treatment.