Medicine for the Needy | God's World News
Medicine for the Needy
Jet Balloon
Posted: March 02, 2020

Madeleine Mukantagara hears only the puff of her own breath and the scuff of her shoes. She’s headed to visit her first patient of the day in the quiet countryside of Rwanda.

This spot didn’t used to be quiet. The cries of her patient, Vestine Uwizeyimana, echoed down the hill to the road below. For 15 years, Ms. Uwizeyimana experienced unrelenting pain. Disease was wearing away her spine. She could no longer walk. She could barely turn over in bed. She spent her days in a small, dark room with a dirt floor. Now her cries have calmed. That’s because of what Ms. Mukantagara carries in her bag: morphine.

Morphine is a medicine for severe pain. In wealthy countries, most people can get this medicine if necessary. Often, they can get more expensive versions of it too. But Rwanda is poor. Millions there have no access to these kinds of drugs. Why? Companies don’t make much money selling cheap morphine to the poor and dying.

Rwandans came up with an answer. They started making their own morphine. It costs only pennies. Health workers like Ms. Mukantagara deliver the morphine in plastic bottles to homes across the country.

Often, people with life-threatening sicknesses need relief from pain. That relief is called palliative care. Making morphine in Rwanda means all citizens can get palliative care for free.

“Without this medicine I think I would die,” says Ms. Uwizeyimana. She smiles when Ms. Mukantagara arrives. The nurse settles on the edge of Ms. Uwizeyimana’s bed. They begin with prayer. “Now I think everything is possible,” says Ms. Uwizeyimana.

Many Rwandan patients using morphine eventually die of the diseases that cause them so much pain. Ms. Mukantagara says the work is never easy. But with morphine, she says, at least her patients can die with dignity.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. — Psalm 147:3