Health Action Day

On Saturday, the three of us decided to volunteer our time at a Health Action Day that was being put on jointly by the Madrassa Resource Centre and the Community Health Department (my workplace).

We arrived bright and early Saturday morning (and very blurry eyed due to a late Friday night) at 7am at the MRC office in downtown Mombasa ready to go. We were driving to Kalifi district which is just over an hour outside Mombasa. An incredibly bumpy ride as we got more and more rural the number of potholes and bumps totally outnumbered the amount of paved road (or what passes for roads out here).

Anyways, we arrived in a small village in Kalifi to find that there were probably about a hundred people already waiting for us. We were basically setting up a free clinic for rural villagers to come and see a doctor and get medication if need be (separate clinics fro men and women/children were setup). There was also a voluntary AIDS testing centre where people could get their HIV status…makes me wonder how many people received a death sentence…There was also a testing centre for young children to be weighed to ensure they were being nourished properly.

People from all over the area (some I was told would walk about 10km) to this clinic. They would begin by registering themselves where we took their name, age, sex and hometown (it was interesting to note that some did not even know their age). From there they were directed to the appropriate clinic. It should come as no surprise that before we knew it, the lineup stretched probably a good 4-500 metres.

I was placed in the pharmacy to help pack drugs to dispense to patients as they came with their prescriptions from the doctors (~15 doctors in total had volunteered their time). It was a bit of a rush in the beginning as the lineup outside the makeshift pharmacy continued to grow and we pack drugs as fast as we could. At one point we decided to count just how many Canadian laws we were breaking by doing what we were doing (lost count eventually) but then again – Canadian laws don’t exactly matter here.

The hours passed somewhat quickly as patients came in and out and medical advice/prescriptions were passed out. In the afternoon, I switched over to the registration desk to help register people as they came. We started seeing patients at ~9am and about 6 hours and over 1200 patients later, we decided that we had to at least stop registering patients as we realized that it was already 3pm and to see the patients that were already registered and waiting in line would take another 3 hours or so and then cleanup and debrief.

While I completely understood and agreed with closing down registration, it was incredibly disheartening to have to turn people away and times like these I’m glad I don’t understand the local language as I didn’t want to know what the people were saying when we told them we couldn’t help them. I will never forget the look on the face of the frist man we told we couldn’t register as we had to close. Some were resigned and started the long walk back home, others decided to just hang around the clinic – maybe if anything to justify their long walk there. But you could definitely see a look of anguish on some of their faces. While its comforting to know that over 1200 people were seen, I foolishly wish that we could have helped them all. But my hats off to the physicians who tirelessly and without breaks stayed all day to see and treat these people. Sometimes I wonder though, were the drugs we were prescribing really going to help? Would the illnesses these people were suffering from be cured by a few advils or some cough syrup? Part of me thinks that the real medicine was the one-to-one interaction with the doctor and that just having someone who listened was the best medicine. I’m glad I got the opportunity to see grassroots health like this in action and I hope I get the chance to do it again. As for those people who didn’t get to be seen, I hope they come back…