HEALTH

Giving A Hand Up, Not A Hand Out

Without doubt the worst disease in Africa is poverty. People die of it every day here in Kenya.

And the cure is not really charity. Charity doesn't really last. Charity can create dependence. Charity is not respectful.… When you are dealing with women with the skills and the untapped potential of Mama B's women, the cure is business. And we are doing what we can.

Having said which, malnutrition is rife, HIV/AIDS was rife among the poor – especially women – and who knows what President Trump's cessation of health aid to the Third World will do. Nothing good. Small medical centres are closing across Kenya already and ARVs are increasingly hard to come by.

Healthcare generally for the truly poor is dreadful.

Mama Biashara takes food supplements – cod liver oil and multivits – but everything is subject to customs duty, even donations, unless you can persuade the agents at the airport to let it through so it is always a bit of a gamble. But the supplements are, literally, life savers for people who are so undernourished.

We also take Tea Tree Oil ( a must for treatment of ringworm), but everything else, we buy there – from cough mixtures to anti-diarrhoea tablets and diclofenac ointment to iodine for the treatment of jiggers.

By visiting areas suffering an epidemic and teaching the people simply to boil their water before using it, we stopped cholera in its tracks in Nakuru and Mombasa.

We have helped people understand that cooking indoors in a non ventilated single room can be what is causing their congestion, their coughs, their headaches and feelings of being unwell. That dietary changes will cure what the women call ‘ulcers’, and that the menopause is not an illness.

Information is power. And we hand out as much as we can wherever we can.