In the latest update in the archive Father Lamburn, founder of Kindwitwi, talks of taking on responsibility for the village and building huts. For those of you who want to hear the material please visit our special pages and see below:
Please see the transcript below for clip 4:
‘The task before us when we took over Kindwitwi in January 1964 was a very big one. There were no permanent buildings of any kind, the huts in which the patients lived were of the feeblest construction.
On my last visit to Kindwitwi before the actual take-over, I was asked to go to see a patient. What I saw made me weep. In a hut, which even when it was new, wasn’t big enough or sufficiently well built to be a goat house, a man was lying on a rough string bed. His bed had been pushed against one wall and that was the only thing that prevented the whole of that wall from falling down. And the man on that bed was dying. He did die some three days later.
Now in this picture, you can see can see one of the old bad huts next door to new one. We have not been able to build permanent huts such as the one in this picture for all the patients, but we have been able to encourage and help patients to build really good huts for themselves.’