Organic Health Response for HIV/AIDS in Kenya

The Organic Health Response has been feeling the momentum of their work spread across Mfangano and the world. After the great turn out on World AIDS Day 2009, Organic Health Response celebrated the 2nd Earth Day event on Mfangano this April. The day was filled with events such as garbage pickup competition, tree seedling give away, organic pesticide demo, stone collecting competition, and Voluntary Counseling and Testing services. The event ended with the Radio Committee broadcasting earth friendly facts on the microphone and the declaration of Mfangano’s first Environmental Hero Award.

We are almost half way through 2010 and we’ve really been gaining ground. With construction soon coming to complete on the Ekialo Kiona Center, the building crew has been offered future opportunities to use and teach their skills of sustainable design around the island. A vocational school on Mfangano has hired the crew to teach their students the ferro cement technique and build additional living quarters.

We’ve hired community members from the surrounding communities representing Mfangano East to act as a secretary, groundskeeper, security guards, receptionist, and information technologist at the Ekialo Kiona Center. All were hired by January 2010 and have been helping the OHR Director get the Ekialo Kiona Center off the ground.

Beyond Mfangano, friends of the Organic Health Response across the globe have been sharing the mission with fundraisers and awareness events. This year events have taken place in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Hangzhou, China with a great response.

Plans are already moving forward for the summer in Mfangano with a group of students from the University of California San Francisco traveling to the island for research. They plan to evaluate program effectiveness and determine potential scalability of Organic Health Response pilot programs for similarly affected communities across Lake Victoria, sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond.

Thank you for your support and continued belief in our mission. The community of Mfangano and volunteers and staff of Organic Health Response genuinely appreciate your compassion and contributions. As one of the community members said “When I'm at EK (Ekialo Kiona Center), I'm feeling happy.” We feel it too!

It's been a great year for the Organic Health Response ... we launched our new website at www.organichealthresponse.org, we celebrated Worlds AIDS Day on December 1st, 2009, with over 1,000 visitors for the Ekialo Kiona Soccer game and Awareness Events at our project site in Western Kenya, and we're getting even closer to finishing construction of the solar-powered Ekialo Kiona community resource center.

We are so grateful for all of the continued support we have received. The Mfangano community truly felt this support in 2009 through all of the progress during the year.

In 2008, when we set our building completion date for December 1st, 2009 – in celebration of World AIDS Day – we knew we were setting ourselves up for a challenge. We gave ourselves 1 full year to design and build a solar powered community center … on a remote island in the middle of Lake Victoria, with no electricity, no vehicles, and a 3-hour wooden ferryboat ride between the mainland and our site at Kitawi Beach on Mfangano Island. We also decided to build this center as from our community---no outside contracting firms... We decided to build the EK center from local designs, with local sand and stones, with 100% local labor, and through local leadership.

So far, we’ve encountered only a few bumps along the way. Designed, built, and managed almost entirely by Kenyans, we are extremely proud of our work thus far. We continue to work hard to complete the roof, windows, doors, and interior details. Our next steps of interior set-up and program implementation will begin in the Spring of 2010.

Stay tuned for more updates in 2010. We have a lot to look forward to, including the launch of the Ekialo Kiona Radio Station set to launch in the spring and the Micro-Clinic Network in the summer of 2010. Produced in Suba and Luo language, Ekialo Kiona Radio will facilitate health and nutrition awareness, sustainable agriculture and fishing innovation, youth engagement, indigenous culture and history, and original music. EKR will help maintain our network of micro-clinics, give young people a chance to contribute their voices, and cement a sense of solidarity for thousands of isolated people across Lake Victoria.

Through partnership with the Global Micro-Clinic Project, OHR is designing special workshops to empower 100 cooperatives of 5-25 people with practical tools to address the biological and social aspects of HIV/AIDS infection. This micro-clinic network will serve as a social infrastructure across Mfangano to implement sustainable initiatives such as organic farm plots, composting bio-gas latrines, solar cooking ovens, and other innovative health programs.

A huge thank you for being a part of the Organic Health Response and helping our work move forward. We can't wait for 2010 and will continue to keep you updated. As Chas Salmen said, "The vision we have been talking about for 3 years is really happening."