Seeing your impact first hand: A trip to CURE Zimbabwe

Marina, our Head of Development at CURE UK, recently visited the CURE Hospital in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Read about her trip:

In mid-February, I had the privilege of visiting CURE Children's Hospital in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. I flew out to Bulawayo to help facilitate an orthopaedic training course. This training course was organised as a key part of CURE’s mission: to strengthen national healthcare systems in countries where we serve, and make the high quality of healthcare sustainable.
 
This was the 15th course run by Oxford University and the University of Western Australia team in low- and middle-income countries, but it was very much my first!
 
Over three packed days, a group of around 28 trainees and consultants from across Zimbabwe gathered in a conference room for an intensive, interactive learning experience. It was brilliant to see how completely engaged the delegates were — particularly once they clocked that their teachers, Mr Duncan Whitwell and Professor David Wood, were going to be putting them on the spot with questions throughout. By the second day of the course, the delegates had noticeably become more confident and comfortable with voicing their opinions, answering questions, and applying the new approaches they were learning.
 
The end of course test showed a massive 20% improvement from the pre-course test – which I’m told by the seasoned pros is one of the best results we’ve seen. It really speaks volumes about the dedication and enthusiasm of Zimbabwe’s orthopaedic community, and the excellent tuition of the faculty. It was particularly great to see the delegates from different cities connecting with one another and discussing the possibility of future collaborations, fellowships, and ways to realistically incorporate what they had learned on the course into a local setting.

Beyond the course itself, what stayed with me most was the spirit of CURE. I’ve been at CURE UK for a year now, and am well versed in its incredible work, but setting foot in the hospital and seeing it for myself was exceptionally moving.

It is a remarkable place, not only for the holistic orthopaedic care it provides but for the community it fosters in the patients, and the pride it gives the people that work there. A new Prosthetics and Orthotics Workshop is currently under construction, promising to expand surgical capacity, and a brilliant surgeon from Ethiopia will soon be joining the team. The hospital is growing in all the right ways – it just needs funding!

I had anticipated being wow-ed by the surgeons and the exceptional standard of care, but truly what struck me most in the end were the human connections. Many of the children arriving at CURE have spent their lives feeling different—isolated by disability, sometimes shunned by their communities. In this hospital, for the first time, they’re surrounded by others just like them, forging friendships in the wards, playing together, and gaining a sense of belonging they might not have had before. Their mothers, too, finding real empathy and support in each other, perhaps for the first time. I found those human connections very poignant, more so than I’d anticipated.

It showed me that CURE is not just a hospital; it’s a place of healing in every sense of the word. Seeing the dedication of the surgeons and the impact on the children just emphasised why their work, and your generosity, matters so much.

Thank you for being part of these children’s journey. Believe me, your support is changing lives in ways that go far beyond medicine.