It takes some 40 minutes of driving through a dirt road to reach the small town of Janzon from Zwedru. It is a route that attracts little automobile traffic, thus compounding matters for sick people travelling to the County capital for medical attention.

No wonder the Janzon community was lost for words when things worked the other way round - as they woke up on the morning of 12 June 2013 to find the doctor at their very door steps!

“We’re most grateful that these people came over to us with so much needed help,” Moses Deah, paramount chief of the Niao-Gbobo clan declared when the Level One clinic of the Indian FPU in Zwedru deployed in the town for a day-long medical camp specially organised for senior citizens of the area.

The camp at the Janzon Elementary School was organised in collaboration with a local NGO, the Women and Children Development Secretariat (WOCDES). It was the second such medical outreach by the Indian medics since the beginning of the year. Last February, they assisted at a similar retreat for the elderly at the Zwedru headquarters of WOCDES.

In Janzon, about 65 elderly men and women from the town and nearby villages received free consultation and treatment, along with a free lunch!

For Paramount Chief Deah, the initiative was a valuable supplement to what little care the local community gets from Janzon’s lone, understaffed and poorly equipped rural clinic.

 “The supply of medicines in our clinic is way too small for the local population,” Deah lamented, adding that time and again the sick are forced to travel to far off Zwedru for treatment. Often, too, they have to be transported by foot in hammocks because the very limited motor traffic. “And it’s a nine-hour trek from here to Zwedru,” the chief moaned.

Little wonder he was full of praise for the Indian FPU, describing the medical camp in Janzon as a clear proof that UNMIL not only works for the good of the Liberian people but ventures even into the furthest reaches of the country to support the needy.

Sector B3 Acting HoFO Napoleon Viban lauded the assistance extended Janzon’s elderly by WOCDES and the Indian FPU. He said it was the kind of initiative encouraged by the International Plan of Action on Aging that was adopted by the UN in 2002. In the plan, governments around the world pledge to work for the security and empowerment of older persons.

From 200 million in 1950, the world population of senior citizens (persons over 60 years of age) is projected to reach a billion by the year 2025.