Community Health Clinic, Souffriere

Souffriere is a community that has come together to create and manage their own local health clinic.Souffriere is a rural section in a mountainous part of Limbe, which is very difficult to access. When it rains, it's impossible to get in and out of the community. And previously there were no health facilities in the community, so anyone who was sick was at great risk of not being able to get to proper healthcare.

The community mobilized to change this: an organization called OPDSL reached out to local authorities to help them get the supplies they needed to start the clinic and got a local church to donate the space to house the materials. They had an agreement with a local nursing school that any nurses that needed to complete an internship could complete it at the clinic, and that gave them a constant stream of nurses.

But housing the clinic in the church wasn't optimal, because whenever the church had activities the clinic would close, and so the community mobilized to build its own building. People donated whatever they could: cement blocks, rocks, sand, labor, etc and they created a small building. They divided the rooms inside with cardboard because that was all they could afford at the time.  People give whatever they can afford for treatment, or even can give school supplies like a notebook, which will then be given to local schoolchildren. The community recently launched a small pharmacy to help with revenues. Now that the clinic is making a profit, that profit goes to paying for the school fees for 50 local children.