The story of the Dr. Ambrosoli Memorial Hospital, the Kalongo hospital founded by Comboni father Giuseppe Ambrosoli. Today a healthcare reference point for northern Uganda.
The Dr. Ambrosoli Memorial Hospital is a hospital founded in 1957 in Kalongo, in the northern district of Agago, Uganda, where over 230,000 people live out of a population of around 37 million. Here, compared to the rest of the African country, the quality of life is worse as a result of the terrible civil war that began in the 1980s, which broke the population and devastated the territory for more than twenty years. Here, the hospital provides healthcare to 50,000 people every year, more than a third of them children, also thanks to the support of the Fondazione Ambrosoli, established in 1998 to give continuity and a future to this facility so strongly desired by the Comboni surgeon Giuseppe Ambrosoli, who first arrived in Uganda in 1956.
The Kalongo hospital, later renamed the Dr. Ambrosoli Memorial Hospital, today has five wards — surgery, maternity and gynaecology, paediatrics, general medicine, and tuberculosis isolation — and 271 beds. The staff — 240 active personnel — is 98 per cent Ugandan, and some of them come from the midwifery school built right next to the hospital, which, since its founding, has given a professional future to 1,300 young women. All in keeping with the ideal of Daniele Comboni — the first Catholic bishop of central Africa and one of the greatest missionaries in the history of the Church — according to whom it is possible to "save Africa with Africa".
The history of the Dr. Ambrosoli Memorial Hospital, however, has not always been so "peaceful". After its founding, the facility fell victim to the Second Ugandan Civil War. In 1987 the hospital was forced to close and its staff to evacuate, including Father Ambrosoli, who would never return to Kalongo.
In the years that followed, the conflict drew in the guerrillas of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by the Christian fundamentalist Joseph Kony, who became famous in 2012 through a campaign by the American NGO Invisible Children, and backed by Sudan in an attempt to oust Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, and the Ugandan government. The war went on for another 20 years, causing 100,000 deaths, 1.6 million refugees, and the abduction and conscription of tens of thousands of children (an estimated 30,000).
Following the peace agreement signed in Sudan between the Kampala government and the arrest of some of the most important armed guerrilla leaders, the LRA is now very weak. The rebels still under arms are said to number a few hundred according to Peace Reporter, and many are reported to have fled to the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. Life for the population has also improved, if only slightly.
The quality of life has also improved for the population, if only slightly. "Squeezed between Kenya and Congo, still mired in internal struggles that are tearing it apart, Uganda represents a kind of buffer zone, but that does not mean it lacks an identity all its own," says journalist Erica Re, who recently returned from a trip to the African country. "Ugandans are trying to leave behind a burdensome past, marked by 30 years of civil war. One of the tools for doing so is urbanisation. The capital Kampala, for example, is becoming a miniature Nairobi. The other tool is emigration, especially to neighbouring countries."
Father Giuseppe Ambrosoli's medical and missionary work, then, lives on. Today his thirty years of labour continue through the Foundation established by the Comboni missionaries and by the Ambrosoli family itself. The ultimate goal is to make the Dr. Ambrosoli Memorial Hospital self-sufficient and capable of guaranteeing access to healthcare services for the population of northern Uganda. In the meantime, Pope Francis and the Catholic Church declared Father Ambrosoli "venerable" on 17 December 2015, in recognition of the work and life he devoted to the most vulnerable. A man who had a clear sense of purpose from a young age. Father Ambrosoli left his native province of Como as a young man never to return. He died in 1987 in Lira, a town around a hundred kilometres from Kalongo, not knowing that the small hospital he had founded would continue to be a point of reference thirty years later.