Dr. Tim Kubacki is a medical mission doctor based in the small isolated village of Cavango in the province of Cuando Cubango in Angola. “Bush medicine is essentially learning to practice among the severely impoverished in a very low-resource setting,” he says.

“We are in the heart of malaria season, treating many cases daily. One great encouragement this year is the small number of life-threatening cases and deaths compared to other years, and the rare number arriving with symptoms lasting longer than three days. This is the fruit of years of public health instruction, and the population recognizing the prompt recovery for those who seek treatment, and the trust that has developed in our care.”

Read Dr. Tim’s recent blog post here about how he confronts the challenges of treating patients in rural Angola. All images courtesy Dr. Tim’s blog.

Dr. Tim Kubacki is a medical mission doctor who has been serving rural Angola since 2012. He talks about COVID and how the media sensationalism surrounding it has raised questions and fears even in the small rural community that his clinic and hospital serve in Cavango in the central part of Angola.

Cavango health care facility staff meeting (half of the room only).

“People in rural Angola are severely afraid and shouldn’t be. They face far more dangerous killers every day, which, for them, have no treatment (malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, TB, HIV, hepatitis, meningitis, childbirth deaths, measles, heart failure, asthma, etc) and do not fear them. But with these other illnesses, they don’t have the media constantly in their face, as they do with COVID, screaming,“Be afraid!”

Young boy with skin TB treated at the Cavango hospital.

A critical teen with TB, pneumonia and malaria hospitalized.

Young pregnant 23-year-old woman came to clinic suffering from disseminated TB, severe malnourishment and new onset diabetes.

Read Dr. Tim’s blog post about COVID and sensationalism here.

Dr. Tim Kubacki writes about the drought he sees in SE Angola while working in the province of Cuando Cubango. He’s a medical mission doctor who has been serving rural Angola since 2012, we wrote about him here.

Patients in line waiting to see Dr. Tim.

“We were dropped off by MAF [Mission Aviation Fellowship] pilot Marijn, who has been making food flights for the past months to this region to try to make a dent in the famine. He was accompanied by a man from National Geographic who had just driven up to this part of Angola through Botswana, from South Africa. He’s been traveling this region of Africa since he was a kid, some 40 years ago, and he said he has never seen a drought this bad in Botswana, Namibia and Angola. He passed carcasses of elephants, Oryx, Kudu, Hippos and much more. He said every time he stopped and stepped outside of his car, he smelled death on the wind. He said the Oryx are so hardy and he has never seen one starve to death and on this trip he saw many Oryx carcasses.”

Sacks of corn and medical boxes off-loaded in Jamba, Cuando Cubango.

“I’ve seen many patients (perhaps the majority) with heart rates over 100 with complaints of generalized weakness and pain. I’ve smelled ketosis on the breath of so many. Virtually everyone is markedly dehydrated. I gave a talk on nutrition during famine one morning before clinic and one woman spoke up while virtually everyone nodded in agreement when she said, “We just don’t have food.” Almost everyone I saw this week in Rivungo [a town in Cuando Cubango] is in a state of mild to severe starvation.”

After the sacks of corn are loaded from plane to car, every kernel is picked up.

See Dr. Tim’s blog with photos at: kubackisinangola.com