GALLERY: Place of healing
MALIBONGWE RIDGE – Shipping container clinic on outskirts of Cosmo City provides sophisticated, near-paperless primary health-care services.
Perched on an acre of land on the newly rezoned Malibongwe Ridge, just north of Cosmo City, is Fodisong Community and Health Centre. Fodisong is a Sesotho word meaning ‘place of healing’.
A humanitarian project initiated by the Rotary Club of Sandton in 2010, Fodisong currently caters to the primary health care needs of around 1 000 patients a week. Patients are residents of Malibongwe Ridge (pop. 22 000), neighbouring Cosmo City
(pop.70 000), as well as nearby Kya Sands (pop.16 000) and Thabo Mbeki (pop. 10 000) informal settlements.
“Impoverished and vulnerable people need more help than the rest of us,” said founder Hans Ludolph, a 77-year-old Sandton Rotarian and retiree, who moved to South Africa from Hamburg, Germany as a young businessman in 1965. “Instead of residents being forced to walk long distances or catch taxis to clinics and government hospitals in other parts of the city, we decided to build a first-class primary health care facility for them right here, in the heart of their community.”
The Fodisong Clinic operates from 7.30am to noon on weekdays, from a ‘village’ of converted shipping containers, including a state-of-the-art solar powered Tele-Medical Centre donated by Samsung Electronics Africa.
“Ideally, we’d like to offer a full-day clinic facility, and on Saturday mornings,” said Ludolph. “But we just don’t have the resources yet. We are also in the process of becoming a paperless clinic. Patients register centrally, and are then seen to in various treatment rooms, depending on their needs.”
Partners of the clinic include The HOPE Centre and Right to Care, who visit and work from Fodisong’s premises on a regular basis.
Additional services at Fodisong include a kitchen which provides a meal to over 200 orphaned and vulnerable children at the on-site Kids Club every Saturday morning, an on-site bakery that does daily bicycle deliveries to crèches in the community, and a Solar Powered Internet School donated by Samsung Electronics Africa, which empowers visitors to the centre with valuable computer skills, and helps bridge the digital divide.
Fodisong is a registered non-profit organisation and relies solely on donations and sponsorship from the private sector. Right now, Fodisong is in urgent need of an anchor sponsor to help cover the bulk of their monthly overheads.
To find out how you can help with donations or volunteer work, contact Hans Ludolph.
Details: 011 706 5534; 082 452 3128; ludolph@iafrica.com
