The nearest hospital with a full-service operating room is hundreds of kilometers away from INUKA.  INUKA has turned away hundreds of disabled children needing surgery who have traveled many days overly poorly maintained roads. Without an operating room, patients must first travel to, stay and pay for a complex surgery elsewhere before returning to INUKA for rehabilitation services. Sometimes, INUKA will send a staff member along to assist them in the travel to another hospital which adds to the costs. 

The newly constructed operating room will improve revenue, reduce unnecessary costs, and enable INUKA to attract a permanent surgeon to work for the hospital. The future hope is to also start medical missions from the USA or other countries and an operating room will be very helpful in achieving that goal and extending the overall mission of INUKA.

Both patients and staff need frequent prayer to undertake and sustain the arduous rehabilitation and healing routine at INUKA. Recent construction at INUKA has opened space in an existing building on the property. The INUKA team renovated, furnished, and converted this space into an onsite chapel that was finished in June 2024.

Hope for Tanzania has been providing needed funds so that INUKA can improve its infrastructure and the services provided. With the improvement of its facilities, INUKA hopes to be able to start medical missions from the USA or other countries by 2026. To do so, INUKA needed a small onsite apartment building to house the professionals who may journey to INUKA. During recent construction projects, the INUKA team was able to use some left-over construction materials to lay the foundation for the apartment building. For a nominal cost, INUKA finished the building in June 2024.

Parishioners of this small outstation church have been slowly raising funds on their own to build a new church building.  The HFT board used a small amount of incremental funds raised over our goal to put a roof on their new building.  The project is now complete.

The team at INUKA constructed a new therapy building next to the main rehabilitation hospital and outpatient clinic.   The project included a new physiotherapy hall for children, an occupational therapy hall, and treatment rooms for autism and other special needs.  There are also individual treatment rooms to provide privacy for adults and children as required by law.  The project also provided additional equipment for physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and other needs to improve the quality of services.  With the additional funds raised over our goal, INUKA was able to purchase a new SUV (50% funded by another charity) and establish a special fund to cover treatment costs for the needy.

Grid outages continue to be a problem for the facility, and the solar backup system originally installed has not functioned properly.  To resolve the issues, INUKA brought in a new firm, AG energies, to assess the issue. For this project phase, the consultant repaired the remaining solar power inverters and the battery capacity to ensure the availability of day and night electricity. 

We identified an additional issue with recent electrical grid blackouts that their solar system backup has not been able to overcome. Therefore, projects were initiated to correct the problem using the incremental funds raised for the building project.  Initial repairs were made to one solar power inverter, and we acquired a new diesel generator to provide another layer of backup power.

In January 2021, Fr. Nestor returned to Tanzania, and he was given several new assignments, including his role as managing director of the INUKA Rehabilitation Hospital. In June 2021, Fr. Nestor asked us to help him build a much-needed outpatient clinic located next to the main rehabilitation hospital. The amount of money needed to build, secure and fully equip the facility was $250,000. After much prayer and due diligence, we said, “Yes,” and began our “Healing Bodies to Help Save Souls” fundraising campaign. For this project, we partnered directly with Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church for back-office donor and accounting support so that we could get the building under roof before the next rainy season began.  Inital funds were provided in July 2021 to begin the project.

We were able to send a total of $273,800 to the Diocese of Njombe so that Fr. Nestor could finish the project.  Overall, the project was completed by July 2022 which included the building (with equipment and supplies), security fence and an ambulance.  Additional funds were used to fix the electrical power supply as noted before.