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Editor’s Note:
For the eleventh year, the SHARE Kenya-Ohio mission is underway,
and 24 volunteers, along with SHARE Kenya founder
B.S. Bonyo, D.O. (’98),
are on the way to rural Kenya. The volunteers include pharmacy
and medical students, pharmacists and physicians. This year,
they will help open Bonyo’s long-dreamed-of year-round clinic in
Masara, Kenya. The clinic is the culmination of a promise he
made as a child to help underserved Kenyans through medical
care.
As a first-year medical student in 1995, Bonyo led a group of OU-COM
volunteers to Kenya. The program gained official university
sponsorship in 1997. “There were a lot of willing people at Ohio
University,” Bonyo said. “It was easier than I thought to
develop the program.”
Last year, SHARE Kenya-Ohio volunteers saw more than 4,000
patients, at an average of 300 patients a day.
The story
below by Anita Martin first appeared in Outlook Online in April
2006.
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by Anita Martin
Long before she knew she wanted
to be a doctor, Sara Snyder played safari with her father
in the family’s Toronto, Ohio, living room and dreamed about the
wild, majestic landscapes of Africa.
Last December, she got to
experience the real thing. Snyder, then a fourth-year medical
student at the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine (OU-COM),
was one of 31 volunteers who participated in the tenth
anniversary SHARE Kenya-Ohio trip from Nov. 21 to Dec. 19, 2005.
Four senior medical students from OU-COM participated, including
Snyder, Brian Steinmetz,
Kimberly Sudheimer and Rhea Richardson; Deborah
Meyer, Ph.D., who served as the group’s administrative
director; and founder and host B.S. Bonyo, D.O. (’98).
SHARE (Student Health Assistance
Rural Experience) Kenya-Ohio provides volunteer health care to
Kenyans as well as clinical and cultural training to Americans.
Participants set up and run provisional clinics in areas around
the northwest village of Kisumu, receiving a warm welcome every
time.
“In November, the people are
looking out for SHARE Kenya,” Bonyo says. “For most of (the
patients), these are the only doctors they will see in their
lives.” With an average annual income of less than $100, many
people in this area cannot afford the limited health care
provided locally by private and provincial clinics.
Bonyo vowed to somehow improve
the health conditions of his community after his sister died of
dehydration at age nine in their village of Wangaya more than 30
years ago.
“She died from a very
preventable disease and from a lack of access to health care,”
Bonyo recalls. “We can’t solve all the health-care problems in
Kenya. We are just trying to help, to make a difference and to
learn. Hopefully our work will have a ripple effect.”
Project: provide
To keep his promise, Bonyo
attended a Catholic boarding school in Kenya and applied to
American universities, eventually receiving a scholarship to a
community college in Texas. To raise the $800 for airfare, Bonyo
traveled door to door on a bicycle for several months collecting
small donations.
Bonyo went on to the University
of Texas-Arlington and to Ohio University, where, as a
first-year medical student in 1995, he led a group of OU-COM
volunteers to Kenya. The program gained official university
sponsorship in 1997.
“There were a lot of willing
people at Ohio University,” Bonyo says. “It was easier than I
thought (to develop the program).”
Ten years later, the annual
program includes fourth-year medical students, residents and
clinicians, along with Ohio Northern pharmacy students and
pharmacists, and medical volunteers from the
University of North Texas Health
Science Center, Des Moines University, Northeastern Ohio
Universities College of Medicine, the University of North
Carolina and Ohio State University.
Medical students, residents and
clinicians saw more than 4,000 patients, at an average of 300
patients a day. Their next goal: to complete the construction of
a permanent SHARE Kenya-Ohio clinic in the village of Masara and
provide volunteer health care all year round.
Lions and tigers and tropical
disease
Before leaving for Kenya,
Snyder’s childhood dreams of Africa grew precariously real.
“I was extremely nervous,” says
Snyder, a self-proclaimed medical hypochondriac. “I was like:
I’m going to get TB. I’m going to get AIDS. I’m going to get
malaria. I was even nervous about the flight because I had never
been on a plane before.”
Once in Kisumu, Snyder found
herself adjusting to a rigorous schedule. After an early
breakfast, participants would cram into hot, stuffy pick-up
trucks and travel one to two hours on bumpy, dusty dirt roads to
construct their own clinics from scratch. Each student,
supervised by an attending physician, typically saw about 25
patients a day – far more than they would see as medical
residents in the States.
But for all four OU-COM
students, the biggest challenge was recognizing and treating
tropical diseases.
“We learn bits and pieces about
tropical disease (in medical school), but most students never
really pay attention,” says Sudheimer. “In the States you’re
like: yeah right, malaria. But there malaria is like the flu is
here.”
SHARE participants reviewed
their knowledge of tropical medicine through supplemental
reading and exchanged morning mini-lectures in Kenya.
Nearly every patient in Kenya
has a condition that students would not see in the United
States, including parasites, malnutrition and rare cancers.
Adding to the challenge was the students’ reliance on volunteer
translators and the lack of lab tests, x-rays and other
diagnostic tools.
Students say they were often
unsure of themselves as they consulted attending physicians at
first, but grew more confident as the month progressed.
“The situation forced us to have
confidence in what we learned,” says Steinmetz. “As a medical
student, you’re not trained to trust yourself yet.”
Snyder admits to volunteering
for wound care a couple times as a break from diagnostic stress,
but she affirms that her medical examination skills have
markedly improved.
“There really are some cases
where you would see those conditions here, too,” Snyder adds.
She treated a patient with sarcoidosis in the United States just
weeks after encountering the inflammatory disease in Kenya.
“They say: if it sounds like a horse and looks like a horse,
it’s probably a horse. But you always have to be ready for a
zebra.”
Connecting lives
Through all the heat and hard
work, SHARE Kenya-Ohio volunteers found time to relax and
connect with each other and with the culture around them.
“This trip is really one that
immerses you in tropical medicine and patient care,” Steinmetz
says, “But also, we got to experience Kenya in a lot of
different ways.”
Volunteers took day trips to
the Kakamega rainforest
and to Masara, a village where Bonyo lived. They ended the trip
with a three-day safari.
From Bonyo’s point of view, “the
best part about the program for the students is that they can
experience another culture and understand how much they have in
the United States.”
Indeed, despite her childhood
safari dreams, Snyder says the people of Kenya impressed her
more than the natural setting.
“It was actually sad to come
back home,” Snyder says. “The people there were so friendly, and
they seemed so much happier with so much less. It makes you
humble.”
Sustained service
As departure time neared, Snyder
wasn’t the only one sad to go. And many have already expressed
interest in participating in SHARE Kenya-Ohio in the future.
“You always felt like you could
do more,” Steinmetz says. “Having a permanent clinic will help
ease the guilt of leaving. They’ll have a year-round staff.”
Bonyo says the permanent clinic
will launch as soon as they have the money needed to complete
construction, a sum Bonyo estimates to be about $20,000. He
hopes the clinic can open in November 2006.
“The plan is to use our own
clinic as the central place to provide care all year round,”
Bonyo says. He hopes to collaborate with government sources and
non-government organizations like the Peace Corps, who are
typically stationed in one area for at least two years.
With a permanent clinic, SHARE
Kenya-Ohio can create laboratories for more accurate and
cost-effective diagnostic tests. Also, eliminating the need to
travel every day will free up time and resources for helping
more people.
“That’s the most important
part,” Sudheimer says, “to feel like I’m really making an impact
on someone. In the States you don’t see it, but over there, you
make such an immediate difference.”
- 30 -
News for the week of Nov 20 – Nov 25
