Our Mission
In the village of Lukolela, where our hospital is located, the populaton is approximately 22,000.
The principal occupations of the people are agriculture (all is done by hand; there are no tractors or other machines and what is produced must by transported by bicycle, motorcycle, wagon, or pirogue), fishing, or commerce.
A typical house
The majority of the population is poor and lives on less than one dollar per day.
Most houses are made from clay bricks with palm branches for the roof, but some people are able to construct their houses with cinder blocks, a concrete floor, and a tin roof. It is rare for people to have running water in their homes. Normally they get their water from a well and they have outdoor latrines.
Our hospital, St Vincent the Servant, is the General Reference Hospital for a health district which spans an area of 7000 miles squared, with a population of 192,388, but we remain the only hospital for a much larger region of the Congo.
We inaugurated our new Stabilization and Intensive Care building on June 12th, 2020, which is used to stabilize patients such as those who come in coma or severe anemia from malaria, etc before transferring them to the medical/surgical services.
The inside of our new Stabilization and Intensive Care building - there is space to add extra beds during peak malaria seasons.
It is a big improvement from this, our previous building which lacked sufficient space and during the peak malaria seasons would have 2 - 3 children per bed and others on the floor.
A new patient arriving
On December 23rd 2022 we inaugurated our new Emergency Room and Administrative Office building, built totally with your donations.
In September 2024 we completed the construction of a new Internal Medicine building with the help of the Italian Bishops Conference and your donations.
Pediatrics
Our OB/GYN building is the next building we hope to replace.
This building was constructed in 2020 with your donations. It provides rooms for our psychiatric patients and 4 isolation rooms for certain infectious diseases (tb, measles, monkeypox, polio, tetanus, etc). The building was completed 12/2020.
Our hospital has 120 beds. In 2023 we had 7482 patient visits, 2259 hospitalizations, and performed 653 major surgeries and 145 caesareans.
The operating room
Malaria is by far the most common diagnosis at our hospital and other common diagnoses are typhoid fever and peritonitis or bowel perforations caused by it, tuberculosis, malnutrition, HIV, meningitis, obstetric emergencies such as ruptured uterus from prolonged labor, ectopic pregnancies, cholera, and other tropical diseases such as trypanosomiasis, filariasis, amibiasis and rheumatic heart disease.