Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital

The most ambitious goal of the Foundation's mission of improving health in the Congo is the construction of a multi-million dollar general hospital on 10 acres in Kinshasa. The proposed General Hospital will include state-of-the-art facilities and equipment, with inpatient beds, and outpatient clinic, emergency services, and a pharmacy. Researchers and clinicians will have access to the hospitals laboratories for biochemistry, hematology, bacterial, and parasitic sampling. Other specialized departments will offer services in surgery, obstetrical care, radiology, and nuclear medicine. In the hospital's clinics, physicians and nurses will treat all conditions, offering expertise in general medicine, heart and lungs, urology, orthopedics, and otorhinolaryngology, opthalmology, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gunecology. The Genreal Hospital also will treat specific health conditions, offering tests in gastroenterology, resperitory allergies, echocardiography, electrocardiography, echo obstetrics, and dermatology.

At a fund-raising event for the hospital in 1998 sponsored by the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation, keynote speaker Melvin Foote, Executive Director of the Constituency for Africa, praised Dikembe Mutombo's efforts to improve health in the Congo. Dikembe Mutombo "symbolizes a bridge and a link between the United States and Africa," Foote told the crowd of 500. "As a son of Africa, he fully identifies with the plight and struggles of the people. At the same time, he is fully conversant in the culture of America and interacts and is respected by Americans on a variety of levels."

At that same event, Dikembe Mutombo shared with the audience his personal hopes for the Foundation and the hospital: "In Central Africa, there is an old proverb: "When you take the elevator up to reach the top, please don't forget to send the elevator back down, so that someone else can take it to the top. This is my way of sending the elevator down."