Bongo Medical Clinic Day

Dear All,
We have had a quiet day after doing a medical clinic with Fred Mito in his homelands in the Bongo district to the west of Kisumu. Approximately 300 people were seen, on the day. This is a region where there is little access to medical care and few opportunities to access medicines usually.
We used some of our funding to purchase medicines and arrange a team of medical, laboratory, and pharmacy assistants for this event. Fred and his wife did a great job packing tablets into appropriate courses on the evening beforehand, and we hired a metatu (14 seater van) to move the team for the trip to Bongo. As usual, any trips on metatus are experiences in culture, creative driving, fear, and ultimately relief.
After arising at 6.50AM we reached our location at about 10.30AM. The church site looked over Lake Victoria, and most pastors would have loved to have the turnout for a Sunday service!
Most patients were dressed in their best clothes, and eagerly sought our help (excluding a few children who thought Mzungus (white people) were from a different planet, and sought to exercise their lungs freely). We had a long line of patients all day, seeing lots of respiratory tract infections, gastroenteritis, malaria, and aches and pains. We had relatively few skin infections, which was good, but sadly quite a few children with nasty malaria. We were able to test for malaria in the lab, and Carol had the dubious honour of taking children into the lab for the finger prick test often resulting in howls and cries.
Unfortunately, we saw a couple of children so sick with malaria, that they couldn’t walk, and had raging fevers that were evident just from the heat radiating from them. Despite treating them, we felt anxious that sending them home was a sub-optimal scenario, and hope and pray that when we return in a fourtnight, they will all walk into see us.
Overall, the day was very successful, and we hope this is repeated on the next 2 weekends.
Cheers from Kenya,
Mark and Carol