ABC Health Foundation

Summer in Tirana brings intense heat to the city's streets, and for our palliative care patients — many of them women living with the long-term effects of breast cancer treatment — those months demand quiet resilience. Our team adapted alongside them, scheduling lymphedema sessions in the early morning hours so patients could travel while the city was still cool. Even through a summer of significant internal transition, we continued to serve over 50 patients with more than 300 appointments. Each one of those visits represents a woman who showed up, found care, and left a little better than she arrived.

This summer also brought the most significant change in ABC Health Foundation's 32-year history. On July 1st, we made the decision to relocate our clinic to a new facility — one with better infrastructure, closer proximity to the Mother Teresa Central Hospital and the Oncology Hospital, and the space to expand the services we offer. After three decades rooted in one location, this move carries both the weight of what we are leaving and the hope of what we are building. The weeks that followed involved intensive packing, coordination, and renovation work. Our team has poured themselves into preparing a space worthy of the patients who will walk through its doors. We expect to begin welcoming patients at the new facility in mid-October.

In the midst of this transition, a congregation of brothers and sisters from Berlin donated medical equipment that will serve our palliative care patients, our lymphedema patients, and all those who come through ABC's doors in the seasons ahead. It is a tangible expression of solidarity across borders — a reminder that this work is sustained not only by what we do in Tirana, but by a wider community that believes in it.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and we are preparing to mark it with purpose: a full month of subsidized and free treatment sessions for palliative care and lymphedema patients. This is our opportunity to reach women who may not yet know we exist, to lower the barriers to care for those who have been managing alone, and to expand the community of women we have the privilege to serve. If you would like to see that month make the greatest possible impact, please consider sharing this project with someone who shares your compassion for these women. Every contribution directly supports the sessions we are preparing to offer.