Ghana

This health centre is based in a place called Nakwabi in the Sawla-Tuna-Kalba District of Ghana. They have 2 sisters who are both nurse midwives and they are offering help to around 6,000 people. There is still some resistance in the area to giving birth at the clinic and many still prefer to give birth at home. They need basic medicines and small instruments and gloves etc.

After a visit in September 2010, Inter Care started to support this village. The village is the brainchild of Ben, a Ghanaian Pastor and Marion, a teacher from Nottingham who are both members of the Assembly of God Church. It was started in 1997 and the village opened in 1999. they must take most of the credit for the successful funding and procurement of equipment and staff. The village now consists of a school, a hospital and a nutrition centre as well as a farm and housing.

Madonna Clinic is located a short way off the main Kumasi—Accra Road, around 45 minutes drive south of Kumasi. A small, but well-run clinic which serves around 6,000 people, Madonna Clinic recently celebrated the opening of their new lab. The 4 midwives who assist the Nurse in charge, Sr. Annette, are extremely competent. The Clinic has close links with nearby St Anne’s clinic (also one of Inter Care’s beneficiaries) and staff from the two units cover each other in case of absence.

The White Fathers were the first to make Jirapa, in the extreme north of Ghana, known to a wider public. Their missionary activities, beginning around 1930, yielded spectacular results with many thousands of Christian converts and laid the foundations for the development of the national clergy. The most famous was Peter Cardinal Devy, made a Cardinal by Pope John XXIII. Because of the White Father presence, medical care was provided early at Jirapa and the present hospital with 174 beds, is vital to the health of the population.

Operation Hand-in-Hand is a community of 70 children with severe physical and mental disabilities. Some of the children are orphans, others have been abandoned by their families and some come to live at Hand-in-Hand because their families are no longer able to manage their complex needs. All of them have been welcomed into small ‘families’, each with their own house and carer at the Hand-in-Hand village.

Inter Care has been supporting the medical work of the Sisters of Mary Immaculate in the extreme north of Ghana since the very start of the charity in 1974. The Sisters staff a large number of scattered units in this arid area, as well as supplying Matrons and senior staff to the larger hospitals such as Jirapa and Nandom. Inter Care supplies are sent to the Congregation’s Headquarters at Daffiama and distributed between the smaller units as the individual needs dictate.