The woman waited patiently as the mission team processed her samples with the small portable lab, but she doubted anything would help. She had been sick for longer than she could remember. She diligently took the typhoid medication she was given at the other clinic, but the slow-healing sores, fatigue, leg pain and infections wouldn’t go away. In fact, things kept getting worse, and her hope was fading.

When the nurse walked back over to her, she assumed it would be the same answer she had heard too many times.

“Typhoid?” she said.

“Diabetes,” she replied.

The patient’s heart sank. It was worse than she could have imagined.

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“Once you are diagnosed with diabetes in rural areas, they see it as a death sentence and many die within two years of starvation or complications,” said Queen Obasi, a Nigerian-American nurse who has overseen missions in Nigeria for the past five years. “All people think about is HIV, and diabetes is just creeping in and killing people.”

To make matters worse, the few diabetics living in rural Nigeria who have access to healthcare are often misdiagnosed. Rural health centers rarely have functioning laboratories and can only treat symptoms of what they think the problem is. On rare occasions when diabetes is diagnosed accurately, there often aren’t treatments in place to address the disease.

“For you to be able to treat any condition, you have to be able to do a correct diagnosis,” Queen said. “This isn’t happening in rural communities.”

This is why International Aid seeks to work with ministries like the African Community Health Initiative (ACHI) that can both accurately diagnose patients as well as provide a maintenance program for the patient.

ACHI is a U.S.-based nonprofit and the brainchild of Queen Obasi. Since 2006 (with the exception of 2010 because of political unrest), Queen has led groups of health professionals to her native country to conduct short-term missions in 12 of Nigeria’s most rural communities.

Queen said that every time she travels to Nigeria, she is overwhelmed by the need.

“By the time we arrive in a community at 8 a.m., we have 600-700 people already registered for our clinic,” she said. “We can only see 300 people per day.”

However, many of her patients aren’t suffering from what is often assumed to be plaguing these types of communities (typhoid, HIV, etc.).

“While we are winning the war against the scrooge of HIV/AIDS, the nation is losing a vital percentage of her population to chronic but manageable illnesses like hypertension, diabetes and malaria,” Queen said.

This is why, in 2009, ACHI sought out International Aid’s Lab-in-a-Suitcase, a portable medical lab that is used to diagnose patients accurately and timely, giving patients the greatest chance for survival. Since receiving the LIS, ACHI has diagnosed over 600 patients with diabetes and over 4,000 patients with either hypertension or malaria.

“Because we have a lab, our mission is more genuine,” Queen said. “We can take the lab where people need it, and get results right there.”

ACHI has also built centers in each community they visit. Health professionals are stationed at the ACHI Centers, and oversee maintenance programs that treat diagnosed patients throughout the year. This way, patients are consistently checking their blood pressures and sugar levels as well as receiving medications. With this program, they’ve seen blood sugar levels as high as 400 drop to 98 in one year.

This is how the patient at the beginning of this article’s life was saved. Once International Aid’s Lab-in-a-Suitcase diagnosed that her blood sugar levels were over 500, she was immediately placed into ACHI’s maintenance program and restored to health.

“To this day, this woman is alive because we were able to diagnose that it was diabetes and because of the maintenance program we were able to put in place,” Queen said.

Please pray for Queen Obasi and ACHI as they continue to serve the people of Nigeria. Specifically, please pray for:

•Protection as they travel to rural areas.

•God’s guidance as they conduct their work.

•Effectiveness in mission.

•Improvement in quality of life for Nigerians.