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Two Questions for Dr. Anne Marie Keus at Masanga

18. December, 2011
About motivation, privileged people complaining, and saving lives.

Serious birth complications are part of the everyday challenges at the Masanga Hospital, says Dr. Anne Marie Keus, who has worked at the hospital for two years. In this brief excerpt she answers two important questions about her motivation as a doctor and secondly about the special operations performed at the Masanga Hospital for women in difficult delivery. Help Every Day is supporting The Masanga Hospital by financing 20 ceasaeran section operations.

So many women in this country die in relation to giving birth – in fact Sierra Leone has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality percentages in the world. Why is that?

Well first of all a lot of women choose to give birth at home, which is often due to a cultural thing saying that women should be able to give birth at home without any problems. Secondly, the infrastructure in the health care system is both slow and extremely poor. Another main issue in our region is this: there are more than 300.000 people living in the Tonkolili district, and right now we are the only hospital that actually performs caesarean sections. Obviously this is way below the necessity for this kind of operation.

Why does a newly educated Doctor from Amsterdam decide to work at a hospital in the jungle of one of the poorest countries in the world?

At first my motivation to study medicine was the belief that all the people in the world have a right to good medical treatment. In Europe the treatment standards are at much higher levels than most other countries, but somehow people still complain about it all the time. This really frustrates me a lot – because if you can think just a little bit about something more than yourself, you would do the math and figure out that people in Africa, Asia and South America are way worse off when it comes to basic medical treatments. So to answer your question: I finished my studies and then decided to work in a place where I could make the biggest difference and save as many lives as possible.

 
 
 
 

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