📍East Nusa Tenggara, East Sumba – Rumah Kambera – 29 October 2026

🔎 This photograph shows a medical consultation during our community care day in Bidi Hunga on 24 October 2026. One of our doctors, Dr Narni, examines a patient with a stethoscope while families wait nearby. Around 100 people received medical care, medicines and practical prevention advice that day. Access to healthcare remains far too limited in these isolated villages.

Sixteen Cards Beside a Stethoscope

👋 Hello, it's Alex. How are you all doing? I'm writing from East Sumba. Three weeks without a letter. Here, the days often end before I've had time to tell you about them.

Saturday 24 October. We set off at six in the morning for Bidi Hunga. Three vehicles, three hours on the road, doctors, nurses, a midwife and a pharmacist. We saw around a hundred patients. On a table, beside a stethoscope, lay sixteen illustrated health cards in Indonesian.

The idea came from Flavie (my daughter), an emergency nurse at CHUV hospital in Switzerland. Safe water, wound care, malaria, nutrition, warning signs: with patients, we choose one or two things they can realistically do at home. Meanwhile, Erwin leads conversations about prevention. These cards do not replace medicine or a doctor. They simply help the consultation continue a little after we've left.

Because this is the question: what happens when our trucks drive away? Our Kawan Sehat community health workers stay in the villages. Our Primary Medical Care programme sees nearly a thousand patients every month. Demand is growing, and so are the distances we travel. We need to deliver treatments, follow up on cases and supervise newly trained health workers. But medicines are becoming scarce and difficult to transport. Funding this continuity of care is getting harder. Without supplies, even a well-trained health worker cannot provide proper care.

In Waingapu, large billboards now speak openly about HIV testing and waste management. In the villages, we continue malaria testing and prevention ahead of the rainy season. This work also connects with our sepsis study. Sepsis is a life-threatening response to infection. The study included 1,001 households and 162 healthcare workers. Among 998 households answering the relevant question, 950 did not have both water and soap available at their handwashing place. Kawan Baik plans to publish our second report, on how the fieldwork was carried out, in about ten days.

We will then present this work to the authorities. Our ingenuity here lies in connecting things that might seem unrelated: water reservoirs, nutrition education starting at school, a wound treated early, a health worker recognising danger signs. Each offers a way to prevent infections or their complications. We will need to measure the results.

In Kawangu, the perimeter wall around the new Rumah Kambera site is finished. One hundred truckloads of sirtu, around 350 cubic metres of locally sourced sand, gravel and earth, have arrived. This week, an excavator is expected to spend two days spreading, levelling and compacting the material. But not a single building has been constructed yet. We are preparing the ground for a pharmacy, a small treatment room, a laboratory and training spaces. You can follow the work as it actually happens on our new dedicated website. Smart Energy Tech has proposed a solar installation, and the Rotary Club Beaulieu Côte d'Azur is preparing a fundraising gala to help pay for it. Nothing has been installed yet.

And one more piece of news: thanks to TranslatePress, Unsere Website is now available in English, French, German and Italian. That's between five and six million words to translate, so more people can read our stories. Thank you to everyone who continues to stand beside us, each in their own way. Here, your support becomes medicines, fuel, water and hours of training. There is already another journey to prepare.

Alex
For the whole Fair Future Foundation team
East Sumba, Indonesia, 29 October 2026

🩺 When the Doctor Leaves, Who Is Still There to Care?

On Saturday 24 October in Bidi Hunga, we saw around a hundred patients. Three hours on the road to reach the village, consultations, tests, medicines and many conversations. At the end of the day, we packed the equipment, loaded the vehicles and drove back to Rumah Kambera.

But the patients stay. Tomorrow, if a child develops a high fever, a wound becomes infected or an older person needs treatment, who will be there?

That is exactly why we started the Primary Medical Care programme in December 2022. Today, nearly a thousand patients receive care every month thanks to community health workers who come from the villages themselves.

They are not doctors. They are people we train, equip and support. They have medical backpacks, essential medicines, protocols and an app to document consultations. They learn to recognise situations requiring medical advice or referral. Our team supervises their work, checks clinical practices and replenishes supplies whenever resources allow.

And this is our greatest difficulty right now. More people are seeking care, and we have to travel ever farther. Medicines are expensive, deliveries are complicated and stocks sometimes run down faster than we can replace them. Training a health worker is one thing. Giving her the means to care for people, month after month, is another.

We have also learnt something over time: a consultation should not end with a prescription. Our sixteen new health cards, used for the first time in Bidi Hunga, illustrate simple actions to prevent infection, recognise warning signs and protect children. This advice complements treatment; it never replaces it.

Of course, our system can still improve. We must keep training, supervising, measuring and refining our work. But we have learnt one essential thing: in an isolated village, having a trained person there regularly can matter as much as an occasional visit from a large medical team.

And that is the presence we want to protect.

→ Meet our Kawan Sehat community health workers

🔎 This image shows Kawan Sehat health worker Umbu Josef caring for a child's leg at home while other children watch closely. There is no clinic or nearby hospital. Just trained hands, simple supplies and someone who is there when needed. This is how our Primary Medical Care programme reaches some of East Sumba's most isolated villages.

🧰 What We Need, Very Concretely | Right now, our first concern is keeping healthcare running in the villages. Our 28 Kawan Sehat health workers need medicines, equipment and regular supervision. More patients are coming to them, and the distances we must travel are growing. Some medicine stocks are running dangerously low.

At the same time, we need to continue building Water Connections reservoirs, prepare the first buildings at Rumah Kambera 2.0 and keep up our malaria, infection and disease-prevention work.

All of this costs money, and securing funding is becoming more difficult. Not because we are spending more on administration, but because needs on the ground keep growing.

Here, a donation quickly becomes something tangible: medicine for a family, fuel to reach a village, materials to build a water reservoir or a day of medical care for people who would otherwise have to travel for hours to see a healthcare professional.

Thank you to everyone who makes it possible for us to continue. Whether your support is small or large, it gives us the means to do our work where there is still so much to be done.

🎨 This watercolor was painted by our friend Andri, the architect of the future Rumah Kambera centre. It reminds us that health is about more than medical consultations. It is also about women's rights, access to care and information, and the freedom to make decisions about their own lives. In Sumba, we work every day to help make those rights real, even in the most isolated villages.

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