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.