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Article added on 24 April 2008
Extracts from BULAWAYO WEEKLY REPORT 24 April 08
BULAWAYO WEEKLY REPORT :
WEEK ENDING Friday 24th April 2008
We are finding that as we remain in the curent [governmental] state... everything is frozen except the prices. People in business who have always ‘made a plan’ are now throwing up their hands as they run out of ideas. For the pensioners a shocker was an increase in contributions for a medical aid society: they went up by over 3000%. As a result more and more people are coming to us for medical help. One is a stoic Englishman who has been fighting skin cancer for twenty years. Now he cannot afford medical insurance and the surgeon can no longer excise his growth. He now goes to have it dressed three times a week and remains remarkably philosophical about it all, although he does like to pop into the office for moral support. We have also undertaken to make sure he gets his medication.
The Help Network has had to add three people to the nursing home list. One is a spinster who worked for a bank all her life; now all her investments have been depleted. The others are a couple who were going to be cared for at a home in another smaller town but, sadly, the matron died so they are coming here.
One beneficiary phoned wanting a lift into town so he could sell his car to a used-car salesman. We discussed other options and remembered another pensioner getting a good price for his when an auctioneer, whose wife is chairperson of one of the homes, sold it for him. Hopefully we can get him a decent price. He and his wife are in their eighties and she gets a pension from UK but they still need help since their two adult children are still with them and, although they both work, their salaries are sub-economic and the son is an epileptic.
MEDICAL:
Drugs are becoming harder and harder to source, with **** sometimes having to go from chemist to chemist to fill the prescriptions, very time consuming. We have had a donation of prescription drugs from **** which we passed onto **** to issue. These will help alleviate the shortages as well as the pressure on the **** fund.
Psychiatric drugs are in short supply. ... A field worker is going to the local mental hospital to get a complete list of people on our data base who get treated there, plus a letter of reference from the psychiatrist and copies of all scripts so that we can make sure we are ready in case of emergency
2 pairs glasses have been done this week, but these were for frames only which **** did for free for the fitting of the lenses with our donated frames.
WITH LOVE FROM THE BULAWAYO TEAM
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