Changing the Landscape of Medical Care in Chad

Ordinarily, Claire Bedford would be found in a pharmacy in the south west of Chad. Switching between French and Chadian Arabic, she’d dispense medicine to patients at Guinebor II hospital, located in a village just outside the capital city.

But Covid-19 struck and borders shut. Claire is temporarily back in her hometown in wintry Devon, and has swapped her scrubs for a green sweatshirt. Over Zoom, she shares photographs of the hospital in Chad for which she left her NHS job five years ago.

Claire is one of seven long-term missionaries with BMS World Mission that serve in the Guinebor II hospital which treats 15-20,000 patients a year from Chad and neighbouring countries.  She describes her mission there as a practical outpouring of her gospel faith. From working with medicines to the way she treats her patients and her colleagues: her love for Christ is displayed in the daily grind.

BMS jumped aboard the Guinebor II project when it was at its bare-bones beginning. The plan was compelling because it was set in a context of both practical and spiritual need: poor infrastructure and unreached people groups. When Claire began her medical mission in Chad, she had never seen the practice of street medicine. She would be walking around in the market and see vendors with conical stands slung on their shoulders, hawking medicines.            

“It was a shock to me because Chad has regulations in terms of medicines, just like the UK, but it’s easily circumvented because of corruption” she explained.  In this context, her job as a pharmacist involves much more than handing out prescribed drugs. It means scrutinizing the medicines to make sure they’re not the ones that are sold on the streets.

Procuring good quality medicines at affordable prices is a real challenge for Claire and her colleagues at the pharmacy. “Medicines themselves are cheap, but the freight costs to Chad are really expensive. And obviously, we try to keep prices low for our patients,” said Claire. The quality of a medicine, which is taken for granted in some parts of the world, is handled with painstaking attention here. In this way, the pharmacy takes part in the slow restoration of a system broken by corruption. 

Claire and her fellow missionaries are committed to improving the quality of the physical health of those they serve. But there is more. Chad is a North-Central African country with a population that is 55.1 % Muslim and 41.1 % Christian with others who practice Animism and Atheism. In such a religious culture, there is an openness to talk about matters of faith. “Lots of people are up for having a good-hearted debate and you never know how God is going to use that.”

Unlike her work in a UK hospital, Claire can speak about God and pray for patients freely in the missional setting of Guinebor II. The hospital invites patients into the glory of the gospel and labours for their spiritual health. Every medical service is an opportunity to treat people as an image-bearer of God.

The vision for Guinebor II, is that in the long term it should be totally run by Chadians. Claire is learning more and more that her mission is not a rescue operation, but a way to pass on the baton of gospel-based mission. “I have seen even more how capable the local people are if they're just given the right tools, some encouragement and a bit of training.” Ten years on, each department in the hospital has a Chadian head.

The uncertain days of the pandemic have only affirmed this long view of mission. Claire was back in the UK on home assignment in 2020, when the new UK Covid-19 strain was announced, stirring many governments – including Chad – to shut its borders to travellers from the UK. When I asked Claire how things were running in the pharmacy, she didn’t sound worried. The Chadian head of pharmacy, Audrey, had taken the lead. “I just try to encourage and empower him, really.” In Chad, there is one doctor for every 25,000 people, compared to 70 for the same in the UK. The need is staggering.

The photographs that Claire showed at the beginning of the conversation were two aerial shots of the hospital, taken ten years apart. The view in 2010 showed a plot in the Sahelian desert, surrounded by a rectangular boundary wall. The hospital was a lonely spot in the sand. The 2020 photograph of the same area now revealed a burst of buildings around the rectangular boundary of the Guinebor II hospital.

“You can see that the whole community has basically been built up around the hospital”. The two photographs are visual evidence of the important work that begins inside the hospital. It breathes life and healing. And it is changing the landscape.

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