Bwindi Community Hospital

Bwindi Community Hospital was founded in 2003 by Scott and Carol Kellermann. It began as an outreach clinic under a tree, and has grown into a 112-bed Hospital providing health care and health education services to a population of over 100,000 people. The Hospital began as a special mission to help the Batwa pygmies who were displaced from the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest after it was made a National Park in 1993. Since leaving the forest many Batwa have lived in extreme poverty and are affected by the health issues that poverty brings. The Hospital was started particularly to provide health care to the Batwa, but quickly found itself treating all people living in the area. We define our population as the sub-counties of Kayonza and Mpungu in Kanungu District, and we now provide HIV education and treatment and dental outreach to a third sub-county, Kanyantorogo. There are few other decent health services in this extremely remote area and people sometimes walk for more than a day to get to us. We send outreach teams into the community seven days a week to try to make sure that health care is accessible to all, and in June 2009 we opened a satellite health care centre in a Batwa settlement called Byumba, about 20 kilometres away from Bwindi.