During a visit to their Centre Medical Nazareen, we discovered a woman moaning on the floor of a dark little room. “She has angina.” “Yes, does she have painkillers and antibiotics?”
“No, we don't have any.” ‘Then come with us to CEDIGO, we have a suitcase full of them!’ Two days later I asked how the woman was doing? ‘She died that same night.’ ‘Oh God, with angina these antibiotics work overnight!’ ‘She would have died, so we saved the medication for other patients’...
This tragic event moved me so much that I suggested to the superiors of the Nazarene Church that a modern hospital for the poor be built on their property. The Bishop of the Nazarene Church, Reverend Bugeshi, generously provided the land on which his community celebrated services and he lived.

Goma on Lake Kivu on the border with Rwanda. In the background, the ever-seething volcano Nyiragongo, which last erupted on May 22, 2021.

Goma, a city of 2 million on the eastern border with Rwanda, is the seat of the UN Refugee Agency and its UN blue helmets in Africa. Under Belgian rule, Goma was known as the Las Vegas of Africa because of its climatically pleasant location on Lake Kivu.

On the other hand, Congo has been constantly embroiled in civil wars since its independence from Belgium in 1960, and large parts of the northeast are still ruled by rebels. More than 1 million refugees from the rebel areas are currently eking out an existence with no future in UN tent cities around Goma. In 2003, 2/3 of the city was flooded by a stream of glowing lava from the eruption of the nearby volcano Nyiragongo.

Because of its good climate at Lake Kivu, at an altitude of 1500 meters, Goma was the Las Vegas of Africa under Belgian rule until 1960 and remained so until 1965. In the background, the forests of Rwanda, a rich country that was inundated with aid money after the horrific genocide in 1994!

Due to their wealth of gold, diamonds and rare earth elements, many areas in eastern Congo are still occupied by rebels who raid the villages for food. Crowds of refugees therefore make their way to the big cities, where they end up in the UN tent cities with no prospect of work or income. Unfortunately, there is no end in sight to this disaster, nor a return to their abandoned villages.

After 24 years of experience with our Nepal Hospital www.nepalhospital.de, the most important requirement for a hospital in foreign countries is the trustworthiness, reliability and selfless commitment of the local doctors - especially in the corruption-stricken Congo. For six years, the four doctors there have been treating poor patients who could not find anywhere else to go, out of their Christian faith, i.e. for God's sake in Congo.

From 2015 to 2019, five INTERPLAST teams worked with surgeons at CEDIGO in Goma to operate on over 1,200 patients (see “Patients Operated on in Goma” above), and in doing so recognized the absolute necessity for the construction of a small hospital on the grounds of the local Church of the Nazarene.

The terrible experience described above was the starting point for a hospital for the poor on the Nazarene's property. Many friends, family, and also the Church-in-Action in Frankfurt participated in the initial search for a monthly support of $2,000, which initially financed a wall around the area. An inheritance from our mother's house (shared with my 7 sisters) then made the groundbreaking possible in November 2020.

My architect son Andreas and I, together with architect Henry Kawaya, had designed a ground-level surgical outpatient clinic that could later be expanded with three additional floors if funding was provided. The planned REHEMA-Centre Hospitalier (REHEMA is Swahili for mercy) received the building permit and the blessing of the Ministry of Health in July 2020.

My various applications via INTERPLAST-Germany, e.V. to the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in Bonn and to the Else-Kröner-Fresenius Foundation (EKFS) in Bad Homburg were unfortunately rejected due to “insufficient sustainability”. However, INTERPLAST generously stepped in so that the exterior construction could be completed in April 2022.

I chose the interior furnishings (beds, office and kitchen) at IKEA in Frankfurt; they reached Goma in a first container via Hamburg and Dar-es-Salaam in November 2022. I ordered the medical anesthesia equipment and surgical operating equipment from YsenMed in GuangZou, China, for a fifth of the price in Europe or Goma.

After a successful INTERPLAST mission under Dr. Christoph Sachs from Berlin and Prof. from Lübeck in November 2022, the hospital was officially inaugurated by the military governor Constant Ndima Kongbader and many guests on March 1, 2023. Four doctors, two administrative staff, six nurses, one laboratory assistant and one pharmacist, as well as two cleaning and two security staff took up their duties and have since been treating patients with surgical problems, pregnancies, and internal medicine issues. Difficult cases are referred to or transferred to the “Heal Africa Hospital”, which is five kilometers away.

The former Medical Director, Dr. Ephraim Zibona, is currently training as a gynecologist at the Heal Africa Hospital, as are the future internist Dr. Jean Bakuka and future pediatrician Dr. Olivier.

The new hospital

The initiator and coordinator of the project, Dr. Gottfried Lemperle, and his son Andreas Lemperle (an architect) designed a single-storey surgical outpatient clinic together with other architects and doctors on site. After completion and commissioning, a second floor was added. The planned Center Hospitalier REHEMA (Rehema means mercy in Swahili) received building permission from the building authorities and the Ministry of Health in July 2020. The hospital will initially have a capacity of 16 beds and will include an operating room, sterilization room, 24-hour outpatient clinic with 3-4 doctors, and various monitoring rooms. Meanwhile, in July 2024, the second floor was inaugurated, with departments for gynecology, obstetrics, pediatrics and, above all, neonatology (unique in Goma!).

Should the need and corresponding funding opportunities arise in the future to set up an internal and an orthopaedic department, two more floors can be added to the existing two.

When traveling through Goma and the surrounding villages, I noticed the many disabled people who have to eke out an existence as beggars, sliding around on the floor and without wheelchairs or leg braces and operations.

All those with congenitally crippled legs would have preferred a wheelchair to a transtibial amputation with prostheses but being able to walk upright. Slowly, slowly.

In a wheelchair that cost $150 from China, they are mobile and can look for a job selling phone cards or lottery tickets, etc.

His life will also change completely, from beggar to employee or salesperson.

Distributing wheelchairs from China in front of the hospital. We had to take the wheelchair away from the mentally handicapped boy.

So far, we have been able to finance the education of more than 50 polio-paralyzed students to become public health officers, laboratory technicians, physiotherapists or computer specialists. In addition, around 50 healthy students with no financial means but with good high school diplomas were able to study nursing or midwifery, 25 of them with scholarships from the B.Braun Foundation in Melsungen.

Disabled high school graduates were the first to receive a computer for their paramedical studies. By the end of 2025, they will all have passed their exams. (IS THE END OF THE SENTENCE CORRECT? WAS THAT MISSING?)

These are people in many villages in Congo who were born with fixed, right-angled knee joints that can be placed vertically on the legs with the help of an extension of the tendons behind the knee joint - or, like the fourth woman, with a simple splint on her polio-paralyzed left leg and a crutch! They have never been introduced to an orthopedist because of poverty - and live their lives as beggars on the floor...

These two girls have either stiff knees or polio-paralyzed lower legs, but neither the family nor the teachers are committed to getting them treatment. Empathy seems to be unknown to the otherwise likeable Congolese.

Text 200b:

Hydrocephalus, in which the cerebral fluid (liquor) does not drain to the spinal cord. In this case, a drainage tube (shunt) must be placed to the abdominal cavity as a matter of urgency (see Fig. 2).
Here, the drainage runs over the right skullcap under the skin of the neck and chest into the abdominal cavity, where the continuously produced cerebral fluid is absorbed – which would otherwise occur in the spinal canal.

Venous tendril hemangioma that grows over many years and can probably only be removed step by step using long clamps.

Benign nerve tumor (neurofibroma) that has been growing slowly since birth and had to be reduced in size in a sub-radical manner in two major excisions in a courageous operation (because it is riddled with many tangles of arteries).

Noma is a disease that affects children and young people. It is caused by a bacterium “that has not yet been discovered!” but which attaches itself to millet awns in the gums and can cause an entire cheek or nose to disintegrate within a few days, accompanied by a high fever. Many children die from it; in others, the dead (necrotic) tissue falls out of the face in the following months, leaving these large defects.

The face of this young man has indeed shed the dead soft tissue, but the dead left upper jaw still has to be surgically removed. Then, at Noma Hospital in Niamey, Niger (www.noma.de), Dr. Andreas Schmidt from Murnau will reconstruct the upper jaw of both boys in a microsurgical operation lasting several hours, using a free “composite graft” from the shoulder blade. The pinnacle of plastic surgery!

“We got to know and love the six 'Power Boys' during our operations in Goma between 2015 and 2018. With donations from our friends and family, they went on to study (from left to right) to become an NGO consultant, a lawyer, a customs officer, a shoemaker, a public health specialist and an orthopaedic surgeon. My grandson Dr. Johannes Schierle (a specialist in tropical medicine) and Reverend Balibanga, who took them off the streets and helped them complete their A-levels at the German Dr. Zanner Institute.

Text_F7: They had no chance after graduating from high school and lived by begging and in this hut from manioc potato cultivation...

Her sense of humor and her activities, on the other hand, were unbroken: here she is at the Real Madrid vs. FC Barcelona game, another gang of disabled people.

Now all of them have passed their exams, and four of them have already found permanent employment and gotten married!
Their career and financial support activated the bush telegraph throughout eastern Congo – so that by the end of 2024, there were over 200 students and tradespeople, IT specialists and shop tenants who suddenly all had the prospect of an orderly life.

Disabled people are still despised in Congo (because their mother slept with the devil) and rarely get a job. To promote their recognition by society, on March 20, 2023, I founded an organization with six dedicated disabled people, through which my son Martin's “Lemperle Foundation” finances leg splints and crutches for poor paralytics and possible operations for those born disabled.

This “organization for the recognition of the disabled” is intended to raise awareness in society. The “Lemperle Foundation” initially financed a prosthesis and leg splint workshop. By the end of 2024, 28 patients with congenital clubfoot or knee joints that are stiff at a right angle (a speciality in Congo) had also been operated on at the Heal Africa Hospital in Goma.

Nabintu with an extreme clubfoot and an extreme flatfoot – successfully operated on for $1300 at Heal Africa Hospital in Goma.

Alain can put his crutches down soon after stretching his fixed knee...

Sylvain could only slide around on the floor with his knees in a brace because his hamstrings behind the knee were shortened. An operative lengthening (for $1300) and gradual whining in 2 to 3 plaster casts will straighten his two legs in 2 to 3 months.”

Today, even with many children, the old parents can no longer expect to be fed by them, because they have to leave the family after school and from then on are on their own! The sudden contact with modern times has destroyed these millennia-old structures of families, villages and clans and forces everyone to look for work today. Saving is not in their heritage, i.e. the fact that children will cost school and education fees and a dowry does not occur to them.
Only those who have connections find work at a young age, i.e. 90% of Congolese “make ends meet”. - On the other hand, we can only envy them for their unbroken cheerfulness.

Africa already has more inhabitants than China and India and will have as many inhabitants at the turn of the century as half the world's population today.
Why doesn't Europe finally wake up and change the causes of migration, i.e. create jobs in Africa in the countryside and livestock farming or large sewing factories like in Bangladesh?
The clever Chinese have long since recognized the value of Africa and its mineral resources, while Europe slept for 20 years. They know where gold and rare earths are hidden – and “give” the African governments ports, railways and trains, and highways that end 10 km before the expected precious metals and later diamond fields.

If you fly over Africa today and suddenly see greenery, then the Chinese have set up a farm or tea plantation there; and if you see a lit street or a village at night, then the Chinese are producing electricity there in abundance!

Unfortunately, millions of Congolese are starving here too, even though Congo has the most fertile soil in Africa and its jungle is the third largest CO2 lung in the world. But its inhabitants are incapable of building up a productive agriculture because they have yet to learn true socialism, voluntary cooperation.
“The enemy of the African is another African” goes a modern song from Senegal. Twenty years ago, they were happy in the Congo with a banana in their hands; today they are unhappy with their smartphones in their hands. I see a huge migration of people from sub-Saharan Africa to the north. Hunger has always been the cause of most non-war-related migrations.
Unless Europe finally wakes up and reduces its imports from India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and China, but instead irrigates the Sahara and relocates its energy production, agriculture and technical production to our neighboring continent of Africa.
Despite the richest mineral resources in the world (!) and fertile soil throughout the Congo, children in the cities are starving because there is no “planned economy”.

The Congolese are interested and want to achieve something in their lives, but almost all of them lack the starting capital of $1000 for a small store or a trade - or $5000 to study to become a nurse or laboratory technician.
Targeted donations to individuals bring income and education to young people in the most corrupt of all countries.

50% of the 90 million Congolese are under 15 years old, without any prospect of work. Where should they go but to flee north to Europe? As long as the big European companies don't drill wells for groundwater under the Sahara and build factories or start farming there, no trend reversal is to be expected.

Women have children early, do all the work at home and in the fields, and are abandoned by their ...

Macho men leave her to spend a lifetime working for their children.