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Hope stays afloat

Runa Khan brings medical care to under developed and often-flooded regions of Bangladesh - by boat.

She was well aware that most of her 147 million fellow Bangladeshis live in poverty. But when Runa Khan, daughter of a successful business man, travelled through underdeveloped regions of the country, she understood for the first time how hard life could be. Back home, she cried for days. “There was so much misery, there,” she remembers. “I couldn’t walk away from this problem.”

Khan, 48, resolved to find ways to help residents of northern Bangladesh get access to basic health care. Often, people suffered from easily treated conditions like infected wounds and dysentery. The problem was getting to a medical facility when the region is so often flooded. Her solution: a floating clinic. This enabled doctors to travel through a large area, getting to the people who couldn’t get to them.

The old river barge her French husband had once sailed to Bangladesh, could be converted into a hospital. What was not easy was finding sponsors for the project. “No one believed it would work,” Khan says. But her passion was infectious, and she won the attention of Unilever’s Asian division. The household products corporation invested in the boat, and loaned some of its managers to help set up the organization. And so in 2003, the Lifebuoy Friendship, as the vessel was named, set out to bring medical assistance.

The doctors aboard—some of whom are flown in from Europe by another sponsor, Emirates Airline—see patients and perform simple operations on the boat. Nearly 300,000 people have received treatment in the past four years, for everything from fevers to cataracts. But, Khan adds, “An aspirin works miracles here too.”