The CCC team will depart on October 28 to Africa to establish two new sustainable, ongoing “See and Treat” clinics. This will be our busiest and most varied experience to date. We will be journeying between Kenya and Ethiopia — from urban commercial sectors to rural regional clinics — and simultaneously setting up new clinics while examining possible sites for future ones.
Our first stop will be Nairobi, Kenya. We will meet with representatives from International Medical Corps, who will escort us to the Nairobi Women’s Protective Prison, where most of the women incarcerated are known to be HIV-positive. Hopefully, we will be able to bring a mobile medical unit here to perform “See and Treat” in the near future!
Our second stop in Kenya will be Engos, which will be described in more detail in the next blog. At the Engos Clinic, we will treat women of Maasai cultural heritage.
From Engos, we will travel 5 hours by land cruiser to Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city. There, we will meet with Beldina Opiyo, a representative of the Columbia University, Millennium Cities Initiative, and the County Director of Health to visit possible locations for a possible “See and Treat” clinic in 2014.
From Kisumu, we will then make our way to Mekelle, Ethiopia. Mekelle is the site of CCC’s first clinic, established in April of this year. We will be revisiting and resupplying the clinic at Ayder Teaching Hospital, meeting with our colleagues there, and then traveling to the neighboring town of Wukra to establish a new satellite clinic there. By the time we leave Ethiopia, we hope to have two new fully-sustainable CCC clinics up and running!
Tiring work? That’s just part of the job! Please check out our next blog for an overview of Engos, Kenya.