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A month without a letter, but not a month without news
đź‘‹ Hello everyone from East Sumba.
It has been almost a month since I last wrote to you. Not because nothing was happening. These past few weeks have been packed with construction work, medical care, travel, medicines, training and a thousand small decisions. So today, rather than giving you a list, I simply wanted to tell you where things stand.
 At Rumah Kambera, the ground is really changing
We are finishing the last wall around the land for our future community socio-medical centre in Kawangu. In the coming days, between 50 and 100 truckloads of sirtu, a local mix of sand, gravel and stone, will arrive on site. It will be spread and compacted to raise the south-eastern part of the land by about 40 centimetres. At the same time, we are finalising the choices for the first building: floors, paint, doors, windows, the pharmacy, small laboratory, storage areas and workshops. Moving from a drawing to choosing the colour of a door may sound ordinary, but it means the project is becoming real.
We have also launched a microsite dedicated to Rumah Kambera. You can follow the construction, explore the plans and architectural views, and even walk through the future centre using an interactive 3D model. We want to show this project as it really is, with its stages and changes, not only a beautiful image once everything is finished. âžś Take a look at the site here, friends.
 While we build, care continues
Our 28 Kawan Sehat health agents continue seeing patients in the villages, often directly in their homes. Several new agents have joined the programme, and we now have a page where you can put faces to their names. In Laihiru, for example, Desiana works with children and families using our large fabric posters. We train the health agents, they take these tools back to their villages, and then they explain malaria, hygiene, infections, nutrition, alcohol and waste management in their own communities. It is a simple chain: learn, understand, pass it on. âžś Meet the Kawan Sehat health agents here.
 Bringing back our community care days
We want to organise these medical days regularly again, ideally once a month, in isolated villages. Thanks to a donation from Rotary Australia, whom we thank from the bottom of our hearts, five additional days are now possible. One day costs between CHF 800 and 900 and allows us to consult, examine and treat between 120 and 150 people, with doctors, nurses, Kawan Sehat health agents, medicines and simple diagnostic tests available on site.
We also want to test a “Prescription for Health”. After the consultation and treatment, each patient could leave with one or two realistic actions: reduce salt when possible, protect a wound better, wash hands when water and soap are available, sleep under a mosquito net or return to have blood pressure checked. This never replaces medical treatment. The idea is to connect the care given that day with what happens afterwards at home, with follow-up from Kawan Sehat. ➜ Read more about the idea in this article.
 Making visible what we can no longer ignore
Around twenty large billboards, roughly three metres by two, will be installed. Ten will encourage HIV testing. Here, we are meeting more and more people affected by HIV while prevention and testing remain insufficient. The message is simple: “Knowing your status means accessing care earlier and taking the steps needed to reduce transmission.”
Ten more billboards will address waste. Plastic is thrown beside roads, into ravines and behind homes, and sometimes burned close to children. It has become so ordinary that people almost stop seeing it. A billboard cannot solve this on its own, but it can start a conversation, especially when Kawan Sehat health agents continue these discussions in villages and schools. All our prevention posters are freely available on our website. âžś Take a look at these campaigns here.
That is why I have not written much over the past few weeks. We were simply very busy doing all of this. Thank you for still being here and for following what we are building together, sometimes with cement, sometimes with a stethoscope, sometimes with a fabric poster.
Take good care of yourselves.
With friendship,
Alex
for the entire Fair Future Foundation team
East Sumba, Indonesia - 7 October 2026 |
For more than three months, our teams travelled across East Sumba to understand what happens when an infection becomes severe. 1,001 households opened their doors to us, representing 4,977 people, et 162 health professionals also completed our questionnaires. The aim was not to count cases of sepsis, but to understand where time is lost before a patient receives the care they need.
