Butaro

Last week I travelled to Butaro, a town in the north of Rwanda which is home to several flagship MASS projects. I was there to begin site supervision on the construction of a new accommodation block for oncology patients.

Already in Butaro are Butaro hospital, a housing complex for doctors, and a cancer centre. The cancer centre has become a hub for oncology patients throughout Rwanda and wider east Africa, and people travel great distances for treatment. Many of these are outpatients receiving chemotherapy at the ambulatory cancer care centre. Until now there has been no accommodation available on site for these patients, and as many cannot afford to pay for somewhere to stay in town they have had no option but to sleep rough in the hospital grounds during their treatment. There is a fantastic organisation called Partners in Health who are very involved with healthcare in the Butaro region, and they have now raised funds to build an accommodation centre for oncology outpatients. MASS designed the building and we’re now providing construction supervision.

The Cancer Centre

Butaro is in an incredibly beautiful part of Rwanda, very hilly and green and noticeably cooler and wetter than Kigali. The journey there was amazing as we followed the dirt road higher and higher through the hills, and had some great views of  nearby Lake Burera. At the moment there’s not much to see on site other than a fairly boring excavation so I’ll spare you photos of that. I’m really excited about spending more time up north as the project progresses.

Beautiful Butaro – looking across the valley towards the Doctors’ Housing, another MASS project

I was also able to attend the project groundbreaking ceremony, which was treated as a very significant occasion and attended by both the Mayor of Butaro and the district Governor. Also there was the co-founder of Partners in Health, Ophelia Dahl, who turns out to be Roald Dahl’s daughter! It’s probably good that I didn’t know that while having tea with her or I would have embarrassed myself by talking about Fantastic Mr Fox.

Traditional dancers at the groundbreaking ceremony, watched by oncology outpatients

In other news, one of the MASS Directors, Christian Benimana, gave a very inspiring TED talk recently. The video isn’t up yet but you can read a synopsis.