Meet Dr. Mahalu
“There are two things that inspire me. One is that I believe I owe it to the surgeons who trained me. They always said they hoped that I would become as talented a surgeon as they were, and go on to teach the next generation. I feel the same way about my students, except I want them to end up as better surgeons than I am one day.

The second is the gratification of relieving someone of pain. There was one time in Zimbabwe when we went to do outreach in a rural area. I operated on a young girl there, Lucy. About seven years later, her father stopped me on the street because he remembered me and wanted to say thank you. He told me that Lucy had grown into a healthy young adult, and it was wonderful to know I had helped her to live.”

Dr. Mahalu is Chief of Surgery at Bugando Medical Centre – the second largest hospital in Tanzania – and is a faculty member at Bugando University. He was educated in Uganda, Tanzania and the UK and has spent his career teaching and practicing medicine in Zimbabwe and Tanzania.

Meet Dr. Mongella

“For me, giving back to the community is very important and that’s why I chose medicine. It’s my small contribution to my country."

When Dr. Stella Mongella completed her medical degree in November 2008, she set a precedent. Stella and her nine classmates were the first graduates of the MD program at Weill Bugando’s university, the second largest medical school in Tanzania. The Touch Foundation funds scholarships for over 800 students, and supports the operations of a university that is playing a key role in resolving Tanzania’s health workforce crisis. For Stella and her family, the scholarship removed the primary impediments to higher education: financial constraints and anxiety over incurring debt. 

In 2009, there are only 1,300 doctors serving 40 million Tanzanians. This shows what a significant and critical contribution these 800 students will be to the health workforce.

When Stella and her classmates began their medical education in 2003, conditions at the university were rough. But over the course of their program, the Touch Foundation has extensively invested in the campus: accommodations have been renovated, tuition and meals provided for, and teaching faculty augmented by visiting doctors from the United States. Because of the improvement they have seen – and the optimistic future it suggests for the health profession in Tanzania – most of these graduates have chosen to remain at Weill Bugando for their internships.

Medical degrees in hand, Stella and her classmates are setting out to serve the 15 million people in the Lake Zone. As interns, they will rotate through different specialties and serve the general patient population, roughly 20% of whom have HIV. They are well prepared – medical training at Weill Bugando highlights the many ways that HIV/AIDS has infiltrated all disciplines of medicine, affecting the presentation of many illnesses. Stella says that, despite efforts to create awareness, there is a long way to go in encouraging people to discover their status before they fall seriously ill. These pioneering graduates will continue this work as they build clinical skills, teach more junior students, and save lives.

Stella notes, “I hope to be able to provide much needed, quality health care to the many disadvantaged people. My country has a great deficit in healthcare professionals, and I hope to play my small part by being the best doctor I can be.”