Saving the vulnerable from Africa’s scrap heap

Date Published: 26-Apr-2012

The registration number on the fancy hearse entering the city of Mzuzu in Northern Malawi read RIP 1. It pulled a glass covered cage, carrying the body of the country’s recently deceased president Bingu Mutharika, accompanied by a cavalcade of jeeps and cars filled with dignitaries, army and secret service. It was a procession that would have done President Kennedy proud.

The democratically elected president of this South East African nation, who plundered Malawi for almost a decade, died on April 5. Two weeks later his body was touring the country before burial last Monday in his massive farm near the southern city of Blantyre.

Mutharika’s ostentatious funeral took place in a country which is falling apart – where problems with foreign exchange means that garages have no petrol or diesel, shops have no sugar and, worst of all, hospitals have no drugs to treat sick people. Last summer 18 people were killed in anti-government riots, nine in Mzuzu.

Against this backdrop Irish man Brother Aidan Clohessy operates an extraordinary service to assist the most deprived of all Malawi’s citizens – people who are suffering with mental health issues and children with special needs. In a country where survival is tough, these people are often left on the scrap heap.

But not in the Mzuzu area, thanks to the St John of God brother, who began providing healthcare locally in 1993.

Today, St John of God provides Mzuzu with mental health services and special needs education that are from the first world. Its 152 employees – all Malawian – reach far into the community, with outreach programmes for clients living in the most remote areas who cannot travel across the vivid red-earth dirt roads to the city.

In fact, Mzuzu is not a city as we in Ireland would recognise it. It’s a cluster of shops and business and a market along a few dusty streets. Outside that main area are 11 crowded townships, where chickens roam freely, women carry heavy loads on their heads and better-off residents have galvanised roofs and satellite dishes on their dwellings. The surrounding countryside is inhabited by subsistence farmers, with most people living on maize, resulting in malnutrition and famine when the crop fails.

Brother Aidan came here in 1993, invited by the local bishop to set up a community based mental health service. Before that the Tipperary born psychiatric nurse and special needs teacher was principal of St Augustine’s special school in Blackrock, Co Dublin.

In Mzuzu his first clinic for people with issues around mental health was in the town’s main street, over a shop.

Today, St John of God has a purpose built clinic for drop-in clients, a centre for people who need residential care, and a college which offers a nursing degree, a degree in clinical medicine and a diploma in counselling, all mental health related.

The St John of God buildings shine like a beacon in a city where most structures look like they have been thrown up. Built from local red brick, with pitched roofs, they are bright and spotless – an uphill struggle in a place where dust is everywhere.

The clinic is the first point of contact for all clients, who sometimes arrive in chains, says Brother Aidan. But, as the manifesto inside its door explains, dignity is paramount and once they enter, they are in a safe place.

People needing short-term residential care are accommodated in a centre known as The House of Hospitality. The sign over its door is from Matthew 25:40 and reads “whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me”. Here there is a 12-bedroom acute unit, a 24-bed stabilising unit and a facility, where clients are helped back into the community through counselling and training in areas from home management to carpentry.

This complex also houses a new residential centre for drug and alcohol addiction, the only one of its kind in a country of 15 million people.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.