Muthoka Mutua

Page 4

This Medical Clinic did not begin taking shape until the year 2001. It was in June, 2001 when a co-worker informed me that Terri wanted to talk to me about the clinic that I mentioned to her some twenty years back. Terri's question when I called her was clear. "Are you still planning on building that clinic that you talked about?" she asked. I told her I definitely was and had run into some difficulties. She put me in touch with a group she was working with and we met that same month. Before we knew it, we were on our knees drafting the plans of the clinic on someone's family's living room. We did not have an architect, but the ideas were concrete.

In February 2002, we began talking about visiting the Mua Hills area where the clinic would be built. September 11, 2001 found the group struggling and questioning if we should or should not go. Half of the team members decided against the trip but not Terri, Ron, and I. We were on a mission and nothing was going to stop us from going. Even if Terri had to travel to Kenya on a 20 to 22 hour flight and be there for five days. The development and construction of the clinic is narrated elsewhere in this website.

A person in the Western culture may not think too much about accessibility to health care services. These services are a telephone call away. I grew up in an area where telephone, transportation, and health care services were not available. The nearest medical clinic was some twenty-five miles away. Even today, public transportation for the Mua Hills is one to two hours of walking distance. Most people, given the financial and transportation challenges to health care services, wait and watch or even use of cultural medicine. Oftentimes the disease takes its course until the patient is so incapacitated that to walk the distance to get to public transportation is impossible. A close relative of mine got a splinter in his leg and after removing it developed a severe infection that debilitated him to a point of needing surgical debridement and a skin graft. This is not uncommon in the rural areas. Many people are compromised by parasitic infections and one more infection is all it takes to develop a fatal illness. Diabetes and hypertension are commonplace among my people.

When I was growing up, my mother used to wake me up in the middle of the night to get her some drinking water. It was not until the mid-nineties, some forty years later, that she was diagnosed with diabetes. She was able to "tolerate" the disease for years without medication because of the physical demands of the life she led. I can relate case after case, one incident after another, of how I have witnessed desperate health situations in these rural areas. With this knowledge and my first hand experience, I felt compelled to start a clinic that would benefit the near fifteen thousand people in the Mua Hills of Kenya. ♥