The Endonyolasho Clinic at its launch in 2015, and the many students and community members who now know it as a place where they can find health.
The power of mobile health care, like what Alabaster Mobile Clinic provides, is that it eliminates barriers between people and the care they need.
Distance and culture are two of the most obvious barriers it overcomes. Bringing care close to people means they have easier access, and that health providers learn about needs and customs that impact health by seeing and experiencing them first-hand.
This is what Alabaster Mobile Clinic and its teams of volunteers learned in its first few years in Endonyolasho. Being invited into communities and homes around Endonyolasho brought deeper understanding about Maasai culture and its connection to the health of its people.
They also learned that being in the community and building relationships can make it possible to assess whether a more permanent facility would be of lasting help to the community.
After their third year visiting communities in rural Maasai community, Shannon and Alabaster leadership began exploring the possibility of building a clinic in Endonyolasho.
This small, simple building would be a permanent place to receive care – a place where national health providers as well as foreign volunteers could set up clinics to help improve the health of people in the community. A place where the families could come, knowing they’d be able to find help for their needs. And, a place where students could learn about health and dream about one day being the ones who provide care in their community.
With the help of Kenyan partners and you, our donors, that facility was launched one year later, in July 2015.
Stanley poses with happy patients after their visit to the clinic, Spring 2017.
Since then, it has all that it was intended to be. Community members gather regularly to be seen by a clinical health officer. Students use the health and science library and the first aid supplies. The community knows itself as one where bodies are cared for, which means that the future – their own and that of generations to come – seems much brighter.
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We’re celebrating five years of visiting Kenya and building dignity, health and hope in rural Endonyolasho. Keep checking in for more of the story, which you have helped to make possible!