News from Lacor Hospital - Fondazione Corti

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The future of St Mary's Hospital Lacor Gulu, July 1992, letter from Piero and Lucille Corti Dear friends and supporters, On April 20th, it will be ten years since my father passed away, on Easter Sunday 2003. Seven years had passed since my mother’s death; she contracted AIDS in the seventies, during a surgical procedure. Since then, the Hospital that had become their whole life, has continued operating and developing, thanks to the work, the support and the trust of the many who contributed to making it into what it is. In 1992, thirty years after their arrival at Lacor, my parents were preparing the ground for the Italian and Canadian Foundations which, they hoped, would ensure a future for Lacor even after their death. It is exciting, for all of us who work for the foundations, to read mum and dad’s original text with handwritten notes in the margins, with which they announced the foundations' registration to friends, family and benefactors. We thought of sharing this document with you because, although we had to shorten it and insert some explanatory notes, it illustrates the founding values of their work, the steps they took, the work they managed to accomplish and the hopes they had for the Foundation and for the future of their, and of our, Lacor. Lacor continues serving the local population and is a reference point for the entire northern Uganda. The Foundations have grown and offer a crucial financial support and much more, as we have attempted to illustrate in our past newsletters. We beg our readers and all those to whom we owe so much for the support given us, to read between the lines and understand the spirit that powered the dream and transformed it into today’s reality, with the commitment to ensure its future. Dominique Corti Kind friends and readers, We have decided to write the introduction to this document ourselves, with the aim of convincing you to participate. Participate in what? In the future, by changing it. In fact, Lucille and I are convinced, and we are not alone in believing this, that Lacor’s future in the years to come, should be your task as well as ours. The survival of the Hospital as it is today is in jeopardy. It is the only hospital that carries out “real” hospital activities in the Gulu district, which has 360,000 inhabitants, but patients come from all over the country. It is also the referral point for the hospitals of northern Uganda. It is known as the best Hospital in Uganda, and, even if it is a private institution, it offers its services at a cost that is accessible to everyone. The aim of these few pages is the hope that the words, pictures and numbers will lead the readers to commit for the Hospital’s future. And it is on this commitment that the future of Lacor Hospital depends. FIRST EVENTS We will start winning your trust by shortly introducing you to Lacor’s history. The construction of the Hospital was started in 1958 by Mgr. Cesana, Bishop of Gulu and by the Comboni Mis- 242 sionaries who were active in northern Uganda from the start of the century. Two hospitals had already been opened by the missionaries in an area of 120,000 square km and with almost 2,000,000 inhabitants. Four others were opened within a few years. Lucille and I arrived here in May 1961. By then, the maternity ward, the outpatient department and a few beds managed by four Comboni sisters had been functioning for a year. From the start, the Bishop granted the Hospital an independent administration, which included Lucille and I. In return we had taken on, with joyful innocence, the commitment to finding the funds to complete the Hospital and for its future development, in addition to squaring the balance sheet. We probably wanted to avoid delays and hitches in the realization of the ideal which brought us to Africa: “to create a professionally efficient hospital, but accessible to the needy and the poor”. Lucille and I were alone for nearly 5 years. From 1965, CUAMM of Padova (the first Italian non government medical organization and to date, as far as we know, the most comprehensive one) started sending 3 or 4 volunteer doctors every two years for twenty years. Subsequent Italian laws on volunteers and civil service in substitution of compulsory military service facilitated the employment of these volunteer doctors by paying their journey, insurance and a modest sal-
ary. This was a big step forward, not only for us, but for all the seven missionary hospitals, and for some Ugandan government hospitals that, assisted and organized by the CUAMM projects, could finally develop and improve the quantity and quality of their work. At this point it is impossible for us to go further without mentioning at least a few of the many doctors who arrived at Gulu: Prof. Dalla Bernardina, Bolognesi, Busato, Rho, Stefanini, Molinari, Prof. Warley, Dr. Desjardins from Canada and Prof. Parson from the United States. All of them shared their great competences and qualities. Of course, these few words does them no justice; we are sorry and secretly ashamed because it is not fair to speak only about Piero and Lucille. In 1972, we opened the school for professional nurses with 90 students for the three year course, and three peripheral health centres in Opit, Amuru and Pabo within 45 km from Gulu. In 1981, we started the training of health educators and opened the school for laboratory technicians. ECONOMIC HELP At first we searched for “benefactors” exclusively among family, friends and “friends of relatives and of friends”. From ’68 to ’84, the major donors were Catholic non-government organizations (NGOs) such as Misereor (Germany), Peace and Development with Fame-Pereo, the Roncalli Foundation, Oxfam, Oeuvre du Cardinal Léger (Canada), Mani Tese (Italy). While the Hospital developed, the economic, political and social conditions in Uganda were undergoing dramatic changes. In 1971, with the arrival on the scene of Idi Amin, things began to fall apart even faster and reached an unimaginable decay, and continued from ’79 until ’85 with the second Obote period. These long years of atrocities and devastations in every aspect of social life produced extreme poverty and many deaths caused by violence, lack of medical assistance, hunger and a lot of child malnutrition for the almost 2 million people in northern Uganda. Our Hospital too has lived through very dramatic periods. Many among the readers will ask themselves how Lacor could keep increasing both facilities and output, despite the harsh conditions in which it operated: economic decline, wars, dictatorships, rebellions, destructions, the fear that weighed on everyone, the difficulty in getting supplies, all should have pushed us to give up and leave. Why did we stay? It is true that difficulties are a challenge. At Lacor it is a duty to believe in Providence, to keep a firm hold on optimism and never give up! A solution for all of these difficulties was the Support Group in Italy, which has offered logistic and administrative support and even more, for years. It has raised funds, purchased and sent equipment, medicines, construction materials, food and almost anything the Hospital needed in order to function through three or four containers and air shipments to Lacor each year. 3
Page 1: Issue dedicated to Piero and Lucill
Page 5 and 6: Left: 1993, from left to right, Dr.
Page 7 and 8: Sherbrooke’s Faculty of Medicine

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