BonnerSprings.com

Two Bonner Springs women recently returned from a two-week mission in Kenya.

LeAnn Detar Newbert and her mother, Margaret Stephens, went to the area near the oceanside city of Mombasa to work in a missionary medical clinic for the local residents. What they didn't bargain for was a chance to experience Kenya's own medical system.

On the sixth day of their two-week stay as part of a Mercy and Truth Medical Missions effort in late June, Stephens, 80, fell and broke her arm on a set of stairs. She was taken to a hospital in Mombasa.

"I had a big gash on my elbow," Stephens said. "It took five or six stitches. My daughter and another doctor was able to stay with me, and somebody on our team had a splint."

Of her mother's hospital treatment, Detar Newbert, who works as a family practitioner in Kansas City, Kan., said, "We got really great care."

She previously had wanted a tour of the hospital- "not quite like that," she said - and found an interesting difference in the way procedures there are billed.

"Everything's a la carte," Detar Newbert said. "When I registered, I had to pay 180 schillings, about $1.80, to see a doctor, then if we wanted an X-ray it was another $1,800 schillings."

She said the reason for this system is that most Kenyans do not have health insurance.

The trip was Detar Newbert's second medical mission to Kenya.

"This is probably the best team I've taken as far as their efficiency goes," she said, "the number of patients they could see, their flexibility and willingness to do anything I would ask them. They all wanted to come back - that's always a good sign."

In addition to Detar Newbert and her mother, the team consisted of an emergency-room physician, four registered nurses, which Detar Newbert described as "really seasoned," two students starting medical school in the fall, an RN student and another layperson.

Stephens worked mostly in the pharmacy, filling bags with medication and bringing water to team members.

A typical day for the team would begin with an early breakfast, where members would go over that day's plans before leaving to go by bus to arrive by 8 or 9 a.m. at the clinic site. They operated clinics in four different sites, Detar Newbert said, all of them in churches.

Her team saw 2,017 patients, Detar Newbert said.

"We worked hard," she said.

Much of the treatment required was for wounds, she said.

"There were lots of poorly healed wounds," Detar Newbert said, caused by parasitic skin diseases. Those infections, which she said are particularly common along the coast, were treated with antibiotics.

The patients would be registered and bring a card, which after seeing one of the doctors they would then bring to the pharmacy to get their prescription filled.

"Just one after another, until someone says 'Lunch is ready,'" Detar Newbert said.

It was "very important that we have a pleasant lunch hour" to the hosting towns, she said. "Every place we went, the social time of eating lunch was very important. Like here, (in American clinics) we'll skip lunch and keep seeing patients."

Detar Newbert said she thought she knew the reason why.

"I think Kenyans are more relationship-driven," she said. "We're more work-driven."

They'd go back to work after a leisurely lunch and they'd have to leave "well in advance of dark," Detar Newbert said, because "the road we had to travel on wasn't great. There were no lights in the churches so we couldn't work anyway."

Also, it was winter there, which meant it got dark sooner, though that also meant the temperatures weren't as sultry as one might associate with an African coastal region.

"All the Americans loved it," Detar Newbert said. "We were amazed that Africans were all wearing jackets and feeling very cold" with temperatures in the 80s. "We were amused - they thought it was so cold and we thought it was so wonderful."

Once they returned to the village where they were staying was, they'd have dinner in an open, thatch-roofed space, where the team would pray and "process what happened during the day."

For their last two days, they went on a safari in the mountains, where they stayed in a resort.

"We saw elephants and giraffes, tigers, all kinds of animals," said Stephens. "We didn't get out or pet them or anything. We just saw them inside the van and took a lot of pictures."

Still, the best part, Stephens said, was "getting to meet the people. They were so friendly and appreciative of the help we gave them. : I'll talk about this the rest off my life, because there were just so many things we saw."

Detar Newbert said there was one message many residents wanted her to carry back to the United States: that after outbreaks of violence in some urban areas following December 2007 elections, Kenya still makes a fine tourist destination, particularly around where her team visited, which had what she called "a beautiful sand beach" on the Indian Ocean.

"Tell people it's OK here," she said they told her.

That message is all the more urgent because food prices have about doubled there, she said, and that's caused partly because of a recent drop in tourism.

"I talked to several people who hadn't worked since January," Detar Newbert said. "That was a real problem."

Comments