Dr. Hippalyt Pul (right) presents Father Michael Pfleger with a stole from Ghana as “thank you” for support of an African clinic. Photo by Michael D. Wamble

By Michael D. Wamble
STAFF WRITER

“We have been looking for this type of partnership ... to help transform the way people look at the world and help their understanding of the realities of Africa,” said Dr. Hippalyt Pul, a program director for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Ghana at St. Sabina Parish Feb. 11.

The parish has begun a relationship with a medical clinic in Ghana to combat AIDS.

The predominantly African-American parish donated $15,000 to establish an anonymous HIV-testing center in Tamale, Ghana at a Feb. 11 Mass celebrating Black History Month.

Upon presenting the check, St. Sabina pastor Father Michael Pfleger stated that this is just the beginning of their partnership.

“We are not only going to build the center, but we intend to send nurses, doctors and social workers from this church to volunteer at the clinic so that it may become all that it can be in Northern Ghana,” said Pfleger.

The link between the parish and the clinic was assisted by James Lund, CRS major gift officer, and Elena Segura from the Chicago archdiocesan Office for Peace and Justice, who coordinates local CRS efforts.

Officially only 3 percent of the adult population of Ghana have been diagnosed as HIV-positive, but according to Pul, the actual percentage is much higher.

The problem said Pul is that the fear that stems from the “social stigma” of publicly being HIV-positive significantly lowers the rate in which people are tested.

“Until 1995, the HIV-positive rate was zero because there was zero awareness and no testing,” he said. “But as people began to be tested, the rate jumped 300 percent. That means a lot of cases hadn’t and still haven’t been discovered.”

The hope is that the center’s anonymity will promote testing.

“Here the sampling point will be different from the testing point, and therefore no one in the chain will be able to connect the result to a person,” said Pul of the Shekhinah Clinic. Shekhinah is a Hebrew word meaning “presence of God.”

Since 1991, the clinic, founded by Dr. David Abdulai, has served as a medical site and a residence for poverty-stricken patients and their families with nowhere else to live.

Lund, who visited the clinic last June, said that not all of the clinic residents are HIV-positive. Some suffer from tuberculosis and additional maladies. Others need time to recover from surgeries.

Pul informed the congregation that the facility will be called the St. Sabina Laboratory Center.

The partnership between the parish and the clinic, said Segura, is “unusual” in nature.

Of this project, Pul is optimistic about the partnership, saying, “I hope, as Father [Pfleger] said, it is only a sign of things to come.”