THE management and staff of Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH, are ecstatic with joy, appreciation and gratitude to the Apapa Family of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, RCCG. This Family, comprising about 1500 parishes in Nigeria plus visible presence in nearly all African countries, in Europe, USA, Asia and Oceania, these change agents have reconstructed a ward at LASUTH and brought General Electric, GE, to turn it into a state-of- the-art Intensive Care Unit, ICU which it donated to LASUTH, free of charge.

Some of the donated equipment

Speaking of the multi-million naira ICU to be named after Pastor Enoch and Folu Adeboye, the General Overseer of RCCG and his wife, Pastor Idowu Iluyomade, a successful and intellective lawyer and head of Apapa Family, stated that the gesture was in line with Apapa Family’s vision and passion to extend the frontiers of Christian Social Responsibility, CSR, “a passion to give back to society and help to put a little smile on a gloomy face, next door”.

Through the Excel Conference platform, a rendezvous of the entire Apapa family, a gathering of over 200,000 people, the family, Iluyomade adds, has continued to strive not only to touch the soul of the society spiritually but to reach the heart of their welfare. Indeed the Apapa Family strides for the cause of humanity and sacrificial giving have continued to confound many a close observer. In the same quest to affect and improve the health of people in the areas of its operation, the Apapa Family set up Healing Stripes Hospital, a dialysis and diagnostic centre at Victoria Island, Lagos.

In a country where about 30 million people are in dire need of dialysis and only about 200 fully operational dialysis machines are available, against the minimum requirement of 12,000 machines, Apapa Family’s Healing Stripes became a timely intervention, and a rescue mission bridging that gap as it has, to date, attended to over 13,000 patients at subsidized costs, irrespective of religion, region or race.

Still, healing Stripes gives 30 free dialysis sessions every month and has carried out over 3,500 free dialyses since officially opened in 2013. It is this insatiable thirst to impact the health need of Nigerians that inspired Apapa Family’s collaboration with the world renowned Mercy Ship, a 67- bed hospital in a ship which berthed at the Port of Cotonou in Benin Republic in 2009. In a soul-lifting undiscriminatory gesture, this humane family sent members of the public, children picked from the streets for specialized surgery on facial tumours, cleft lips, cleft palates and cataracts. And all the surgeries were successful.