Healing after the death of Malembo Makene

Update from Chris Underhill (20/06/24)

Having achieved our original target I am updating it slightly so that funds donated will go to Makene's family, Harriet his widow and his daughters Asifiwe and Agape. After an original fantastic fundraising effort where we exceeded our target of £5000 and Makene was able to access treatment hitherto not possible I am sad to inform you that Makene died on Friday 7th June in the early morning of a heart attack. As you will recall he had suffered a serious stroke due to underlying undiagnosed diabetes and we all got involved when I was informed quite a long time later.

Our own fundraising work started when I was alerted by Casper van Kempen the Director of Sibusiso to the plight that Makene was facing. Makene had attended interview to work with Casper’s organisation and I had provided a reference. A positive offer was made for employment (a wonderful sounding job) and then silence from Makene. Most people would have left the matter lie but Casper followed up and eventually was in touch with Makene’s wife (Harriet Kiama) and so learnt about the stroke and went to visit the family home outside of Dar. Because I was a referee and knowing about the link to BasicNeeds Casper wrote me a very moving email explaining the difficulty the whole family was in with rapidly declining funds.

We all started to help some five months ago when I opened the Go Fund Me account and with wonderful rapidity and several very generous anonymous donations we reached £5,148 which was in excess of the target. Having stabilised the diabetes Harriet was able to rapidly increase the physiotherapy and start speech therapy which had been beyond financial reach up till then. Physically Makene was improving but was still finding the speech therapy a stretch. Apart from your generous help Casper’s organisation has also stepped in so that both Asifiwe and Agape, daughters to Makene and Harriet, have been able to continue with their schooling and I know this provided both parents with comfort and a great deal of relief. I am afraid the heart attack that he experienced early on the 7th came as a terrible surprise to the family. He was rushed to the hospital but pronounced dead soon afterwards. His burial has now taken place on one of the islands in the lake just off Mwanza, an ancestral home as I understand it.

Makene died at the age of 53 which is such a young age when you stop to think about it. He originally trained as a mental health nurse and initially looked after refugees at Kagara where people were flooding in from Rwanda. He went on to work with Norwegian Aid in Sexual and Gender Based violence and eventually joined BasicNeeds in 2003 and remained till 2015. At BasicNeeds Mtwara he first was a field coordinator and then went on to manage the whole programme in Mtwara which in the end served some 8000 + patients and families.

As a social entrepreneur you never really stop thinking of the work achieved and, most especially, the people who make the work a daily reality. Harriet describes Makene as a gentle person and I very much agree that he was. At times he even seemed a bit shy. He was however, a real expert at the art and science of managing a big programme in a remote part of Tanzania in such a way that it integrated into the community and did a great deal of good as acknowledged by Tanzania’s Chief Psychiatrist at the time. It was a measure of his success that his teams were very stable and staff turnover was very modest.

It was a privilege to know Makene and to work with him and we must do whatever we can to support Harriet, Asifiwe and Agape. May he rest in everlasting peace,

Chris Underhill MBE

Social Entrepreneur