Chidamoyo Hospital in Zimbabwe

We were sorry to bid farewell to our good friends John and Stephanie Woodman and their granddaughter Zoe on the 17th of August.  They were a big help to us and we enjoyed a lot of good times together.  We know we will see them back here again.  Zoe will have a lot to share when she gets back to school about where she spent her summer. We welcomed 2 doctors from Alice Springs, Australia on the 15th of August when Michelle Withers and Sonia Twigg joined us.  They are on the start of a 10 week African adventure that will take them from Zimbabwe to Botswana to Nambia and South Africa.  Michelle came as a med student  (from London) here in 1998 and has been back several times but it has been 12 years since she was last here. She was born in Zimbabwe and lived here until she was 14 so she has a drawing to here.   I have visited her 3 times when she lived in Sydney.  Her parents are the directors of our UK Trust in London.  We were happy to welcome them and they made rounds with our doctor

It has been a busy week as usually at Chidamoyo.  On August 1st our ART team at the hospital went off for our every other month ART (AIDS drugs) clinic at Nyamutora.  This site is in a research program sponsored by Stanford University in CA and a group in Harare.  We have about 110 people in our project so far and the first results show that 96% of our people there have non-detectable viral loads.  This means their medicines are working and they are taking them well!  This was a surprising result as most other results in Zimbabwe have shown a 25% or more failure rate of medication!  We are happy for these people and will continue over the next 1 1/2 years to follow them. On the evening of the 1st of August good friends of Chidamoyo, John and Stephanie Woodman from Panama (via Maine) and their 15 year old granddaughter, Zoe from Colorado arrived to join us for 17 days.  Stephanie is an OR Nurse and she helping to teach our staff some things.  They arrived in time to help with month