Mama Hope Health Clinic for Rural Kenyan Families

A NOTE FROM GLOBALGIVING:

This is the second in a series of snapshots about project leader Nyla Rodgers and her organization Mama Hope.

Thank you for your continued support of Nyla and her tireless dedication to providing basic health care and medications to prevent and contain HIV/AIDS in Kenya. We ask you to contribute again today! Feel free to tell your friends about Nyla and her incredible work!

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How Nyla Rodgers Came to Build a Health Clinic

In 2006 Nyla Rodgers went to visit the Wind of Hope in the Arid in Isiolo, Kenya. This AIDS community center was taking care of a community of 35,000 people affected by HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS and tribal clashes had decimated the population, especially those people aged 18 to 45. Khadija Rama, the director of the project, told me, “If nothing is done in five years, this is going to be a community run by 12-year-olds.”

In the spirit of her mother’s recent passing, Nyla asked what needed to be done and was told, “We need a health clinic.”

Nyla came back to the United States, formed Mama Hope, and raised money to build the health clinic in honor of her mother. In 2007 construction began, and on August 14, 2008, it was opened to the public. The hospital now serves 120,000 people living in the Isiolo region of Kenya.

With the funds raised through Global Giving, Nyla and her colleagues have paid for a nurse, doctor, and six months of medications so that 120,000 people living in Isiolo. The amount they have raised so far will cover these expenses until June 2009.

If provided further funding, Nyla hopes to create a new hospital wing dedicated to the mother-to-child-transmission of HIV/AIDS. In the region, the most common way that HIV/AIDS is being spread is through infected breast milk. This new center will provide mothers with medication, breast milk alternatives, and further education about HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention. Nyla says that mothers are too often forced to either “watch [their] child starve or give them the disease,” due to lack of access to medication and feeding alternatives.

A NOTE FROM GLOBAL GIVING:

Please welcome Nyla Rodgers. She is a new project leader here at GlobalGiving and over the past few weeks we have had the opportunity to get to know Nyla and the great work she does for her organization Mama Hope.

Periodically over the next two months we will be sending you snapshots about Nyla’s life and work. We encourage your feedback about this new form of progress update so that we can provide you with the most interesting and relevant information possible about the projects and causes you support.

We thank you for your contributions and ask you to consider donating again to Nyla and Mama Hope. Feel free to tell your friends about Nyla and her incredible work!

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Nyla Rodgers' Story: In Her Words

My name is Nyla Rodgers, I am 29 years old. I grew up in Mill Valley, California, and was raised an only child by a single mother. I became involved with Mama Hope out of a tragedy in 2006. In July of 2005 my mother was diagnosed with fourth-stage ovarian cancer. She passed away in January of 2006.

While she was sick, the thing that kept her fighting was our plan to take a trip to Kenya and meet an orphan named Bernard that she sponsored there. Whenever things looked bleak, we would talk about our future trip to Kenya, the warmth of the people, all of the incredible colors, the animals, etc. This trip was such a big deal because she was terrified of flying and had never left North America. She believed if she could beat cancer she definitely could let her fears of flying go.

By some crazy coincidence, two weeks after my mother passed, I got an opportunity to work for United Nations Environmental Program in Kenya. So I went to fulfill my mother’s dream and meet Bernard.

When I got to Bernard’s village there were 500 people waiting for me to honor my mother’s memory. I learned that my mother had given $1,000 from a fundraiser that she had at her house to help women living with HIV in Bernard’s community. These women used the money to buy textiles and to make jewelry and clothes and then they took the profit from these sales and put it into a community bank. The community bank was used to get women HIV medicine, and, because of this, women were living longer, there were fewer orphans on the streets and more children in school.

At this ceremony I was presented with a giraffe and the people told me, “Your mother is like a giraffe: she had the vision to see her feet and the vision to see far beyond, and it is obvious that you are a giraffe as well.”