What is Nuba 2020

• Florida-based nonprofit organization African Mission Healthcare (AMH) has launched Nuba 2020, a new campaign to provide vital medical help for hundreds of thousands of traumatized, but courageous and resilient, victims of Africa’s “hidden war” in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains.
• The campaign is to ensure that the only major hospital in Sudan’s war-torn Nuba Mountains continues to save hundreds of thousands of children and adults threatened by conflict, disease and medical emergencies 365 days a year.
• The Nuba Mountains region is one of the poorest and most volatile places on earth.  
• For more about the Nuba 2020 campaign, go to www.nuba2020.com.  

About Dr. Tom Catena

• Dr. Tom Catena, Medical Director of Gidel Mother of Mercy Hospital, the only major hospital in the Nuba region, is chairing the Nuba 2020 campaign. 
• Catena—a native New Yorker, graduate of Duke University Medical School and former U.S. Navy doctor —is the only surgeon for 1.3 million people in the Nuba region. By contrast, the number of general surgeons needed to adequately serve the U.S. population is estimated to be at least seven per 100,000 people.
• Catena, an award-winning AMH-supported physician, has been a medical missionary in Africa for nearly 20 years.Since 2008, 55-year-old-Catena has put his life on the line in the Nuba war zone: treating up to 350 patients a day—a staggering total of more than one million patients over his years serving in Nuba, including 2,200 direct war injuries and saving the lives of tens of thousands of people.  

Gidel Hospital

• Against overwhelming odds, Dr, Catena and his team of local medical workers run the 435-bed Gidel Hospital and a network of six clinics, performing up to 2,000 operations, providing 53,632 hospital visits and caring for 80,000 patients at six community clinics annually, on a total yearly budget of $1 million. By comparison in the U.S., the average number of general surgeries performed by male surgeons is 500 cases a year.
• In the shell-shocked Nuba region—roughly the size of Austria—Catena has kept the only major hospital in the region operating, even during bombing raids that targeted the hospital and his own home.
• Patients pay very modest amounts to access services, given the lack of a functioning local cash economy.  
• While surgeries and hospital stays in the U.S. can cost tens of thousands of dollars, the same operations at Gidel Hospital cost a fraction of that. The hospital relies entirely on charitable donations to cover costs.  

Nuba Conflict

• Hidden from much of the world, the little-known yet catastrophic conflict in the Nuba Mountains—a region contested by the separate countries of Sudan and South Sudan—has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and injured thousands more. From 1983-2005, more than two million people died during the Sudanese civil war. 
• After a six-year peace agreement, fighting erupted again in 2011, but now a tentative ceasefire is in place.  

Nuba 2020 Goal

• Raise $7.5 million to ensure the hospital and clinics are able to continue lifesaving work for the next 20 years. 

About African Mission Healthcare African Mission Healthcare (AMH, www.africanmissionhealthcare.org) is a Florida-based nonprofit organization, which strengthens African mission hospitals to aid those in greatest need. AMH strategically partners with mission hospitals to support and advance their commitment to provide compassionate, quality medical care to the forgotten and hurting people of Africa, and to improve the health system in sub-Saharan Africa. AMH was co-founded in 2010 by entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Gerson and medical missionary Dr. Jon Fielder, who were college roommates.