St. Mary's Hospital Lacor

by Gianna Campo

This article describes our new charity Fondazione Piero e Lucille Corti, a foundation that provides economic, technical and logistic support to St. Mary's Hospital Lacor in Gulu, North Uganda.

St. Mary's Hospital Lacor, often referred to as Lacor Hospital, is a hospital in Gulu District, northern Uganda. It was founded by Comboni missionaries and is run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Gulu.

During the violent and tyrannical reign of Idi Amin in the 1970s, the hospital was often caught in the crossfire. Throughout the 1980s, the hospital remained at constant risk as thugs repeatedly ransacked the compound, looking for drugs or petrol. Raiders kidnapped staff members and held them for ransom.

Founded in 1959 as a 30-bed hospital, by July 2005 it had 483 beds. It also includes a nursing school and other health worker training programs and peripheral health centers (level III) in Amuru, Opit and Pabbo with an additional 24 beds. Each day the hospital hosts an average of 600 in patients and their attendants, as well as 500 outpatients, for a daily total of about 2000. Due to night time attacks and abduction, by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army, between 2000 and 10,000 women and children crowd into the hospital compound nightly seeking a safe place to sleep.

The first surgeons at the hospital were Lucille Teasdale-Corti and Piero Corti, who arrived in 1961. Teasdale-Corti later died, in 1996, of the AIDS she had contracted from a patient while performing surgery.

Piero Corti and Lucille Teasdale created two foundations set up in Milan, Italy (Fondazione Piero e Lucille Corti Onlus) and in Montreal, Canada (Teasdale-Corti) both meant to ensure the continuity of healthcare, training and development operations of the Lacor Hospital (Ouganda). Today, more than 10 years after its creation in 1995, the Piero e Lucille Corti Fondazione Onlus in Milan, offers Lacor a concrete opportunity for survival and growth: it is actually one of the main hospital donors and represents the continuity of Lacor‘s history and spirit. It is headed by Dominique Corti, daughter of Piero and Lucille and president of the Foundation.

The Teasdale-Corti Foundation in Montreal was set up in 1993, in the last few years it has seen significant growth in its fund-raising operations and is increasingly committed to the promotion of Lacor. Gilles Rivet, Dr. Teasdale‘s nephew is the president of the Foundation.

For more info on the charity visit: www.fondazionecorti.it