LDS CHARITIES-NEONATAL CLINIC

LDS Charities sent a team of health care specialists to present a neonatal clinic in the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital located next to the Moi University here in Eldoret. Indiana University and Moi University have been in partnership since 1989. Our missionaries do a service project once a week in the daycare for children of patients needing HIV/AIDS treatment at the hospital. We assisted the neonatal team with printing needs and we were invited to come and view the training given to doctors, nurses, and other health care specialists from Kenya.

Those who completed the course received a certificate to train, a special training kit, and some of those baby blankets that many LDS Relief Society women have lovingly made for newborn babies.

It was a wonderful opportunity to be involved in a training that will assist more little babies to live, mortality rates are very high among newborns in Kenya. Over the two-day course in the Women’s Pavilion of the hospital we saw many women come to the facility to give birth, several hours after birth be up and about and doing their own laundry (a requirement here in the hospital), take complete care of the baby, and bring their own food and water for the hospital stay.

The stay in the hospital is short but the women were always willing to stop at our table and show off their darling newborn. These are some of the lucky Kenyan women for we learned about 60% of women give birth to the baby outside of a hospital. One desperate mother stopped one of our Kenyan Humanitarian Missionaries and told him she was sorry to bother him but she was a single mother with a sick child at home, she had no money to pay for the birth of her baby, and the hospital would not let her take her baby home until she paid 600Ksh (about $6.00 American). He took her to the payment desk, her story checked out, paid her bill, and escorted her to a taxi so she didn’t need to walk the many, many kilometers home. Another senior missionary from Kisumu told me the hospital tried to put another woman who had just given birth in bed with one of her friends that had just given birth but lost the baby. Life is just not easy in Africa.