Kathie Wilson: My time in Africa with the Slum Doctor Programme

This is the story of how a pre-school teacher from Bellingham ended up in eastern Africa, involved in the fate of a young stranger, Vivian.

I was traveling in Kenya as a volunteer for the Slum Doctor Programme (SDP). SDP is a local organization that works to support people impacted by HIV-AIDS by providing food, education, medicine, and hope. Our mission for this trip was to visit the various projects that we were funding, meet with in-country coordinators, and gain a personal view of how things were going. We didn’t know it at the time, but we would also become deeply involved in connections and commitments.

My companions were Sarah Benn, a local web designer and volunteer for the organization, and Wanabisi Wasekania, a Kenyan man who had just finished defending his master’s thesis at WWU, is a board member of SDP, and was returning home to visit family as well see the SDP projects with us.

We began our two-week trip in Nairobi. There, we met with local doctors who are dedicating their lives to researching and helping people cope with the disease. SDP has helped these physicians with money for medications and hospitalizations and has funded a medical library.

Our next stop was the Cura Village Orphanage, near Nairobi. We were excited to attend a grand opening celebration for the orphanage, which houses 20 children aged four through seven. These are energetic and enthusiastic kids, and we nearly caused a riot by taking their photos and handing out stickers. Another 50 children, who are being sponsored by SDP, will soon join the 20 children we met.

After Cura Village we spent some time in Kesogon, Wanambisi’s village. From there we headed to the Ombogo Girl’s Academy near Lake Victoria. All secondary schools in Kenya are private and segregated by sexes. SDP has focused on helping girls continue their education, because that is the best way to prevent AIDS infection. In fact, girls who finish high school are three times less likely to become infected than those who have to drop out. Our goal for this leg of the journey was to meet with 15 girls that folks in Bellingham are already sponsoring, work out financial details with the principal and others, and interview 20 girls in Form One (9th grade) who are needy and in need of sponsorship.

It is one thing to read a brief biography of a young girl’s harsh life. It is quite another to sit in a room and listen to one girl after another tell of the death of her parents, her lack of food, and her fervent wish to stay in school. We were all in tears at some point during that day.

Our last stop was Rabour Village, where the sense of community and commitment of purpose was pervasive. The church grounds host a nursery school for 120 children, many of them orphans, some of them sick themselves, all of them in need of extra nutrition. The Slum Doctor Programme started a feeding program for the school a year ago. Now the children receive one good meal a day and the cooks, who have been preparing food for all these children over a wood fire, now have new large, fuel-efficient stoves. I especially enjoyed meeting the teachers and seeing them at work in situations we would never dream of here. Think of having 40 children in a room and only wall charts for teaching materials! I made a commitment to getting books for these classes.

We heard about Vivian on our last day of reviewing Slum Doctor projects. It was our second day in Rabour, a tiny village near Lake Victoria on the western edge of Kenya. I was meeting with Dawnson, the project coordinator, when he asked my opinion about a “special case.” Vivian is 11 years old. AIDS had left her an orphan, so she was staying with her uncle in the village. His wife, however, had not taken so kindly to the girl. When it was time to pay school fees for Vivian, the aunt had become jealous and poured boiling water (oil?) over her. Her burns had been so serious that they required 3 and a half months of hospital care. Now she was beginning to heal and was back in the village. The vicar of the local church was concerned, however, that the girl was at high risk for more abuse. Dawnson wondered if there was anything that I could do; perhaps they could put her in boarding school. “Take me to the nearest ATM.” I quickly responded.

Then, just when we thought we had finished our work, we heard Vivian’s story. It was like a well-choreographed dance to see how everyone sprung into action. Within an hour Wanambisi tracked her down and brought her to us, and we were all off to buy her school supplies, books, and uniforms and retrieve money for her tuition. By the next day, she was settled into a nearby boarding school, safe and ensured an education. And we were on our way back to Bellingham, much richer in spirit and our commitment to global community.

Kathie is Co-Director of the Childlife Montessori School in Bellingham.

To Learn about the Slum Doctor Programme Go to: http://www.slumdoctor.org