A remarkable Canadian mobile clinic service in remote Kenyan villages is branching out to address maternal infant mortality risks by adding a motorcycle ambulance service.
Founded by Gail Wolters in 2007, the group’s President, Oakville’s Patti Harbman, PhD, MN, NP-PHC, made the announcement at a successful fundraising event in Oakville, where she was presented a certificate of recognition for the group by Mayor Rob Burton.
Apart from the pandemic years, a group of Canadian Nurses has been travelling to Kenya in West Africa every year. Taking precious vacation time and flying at their own expense, the nurses deliver primary health care to remote villages.
Arriving in Kakamega, Vihiga county, about 10 hours’ drive from Nairobi airport, they get up every morning early and travel in a different direction each day, to set up a clinic in a school or church. The villages they visit rarely have running water or electricity, and most housing has dirt floors.
Each morning, a long line of patients, who have often walked long distances awaits them. 
The roughly 14 nurses work non-stop to provide care. They see malaria patients, wounds, fractures and many other ailments. When they can’t care for the issue themselves, they fund transportation and care to far away hospitals. One common problem, especially in children, is jiggers, a sand flea that burrows under the skin in the feet. Canadian Nurses for Africa (CNFA) treats this and restores the children’s feet quickly and easily, and they fund and manage an ongoing treatment program that carries on all year round while they are back in Canada.
The treatments they provide bring people back to health, often enabling a family breadwinner to work again. In a two-week period they will see more than seven thousand patients.
Among the health problems they have observed in the region are the risks to mothers and infants in childbirth. Complications often result in the death of either mother or child and sometimes both. It is simply too far to get to the facilities needed to deal with anything that goes wrong.
Learning of a program to address the issue with specially designed E-ranger motorcycle ambulances in Uganda, CNFA contacted the Wales based organization, PONT (Partnerships Overseas Networking Trust), and researched the possibility of introducing this highly successful solution in Kenya.
Motorcycles with sidecars are chosen because they are better able to negotiate the challenging roads of the area, and of course because of the cost.
Once it had the approval of the Kenyan government for the project, CNFA set about raising funds to buy and equip motorcycle ambulances and train Community Health Workers to operate them.
Oakville did not disappoint. A number of families and foundations stepped forward to finance one or more E-rangers. This was made easier owing to generous matching gifts by Oakville’s Cooper Construction and a local philanthropist couple.
This project will save the lives of mothers and infants in rural Kenya. Oakville can be proud of Dr. Harbman and CNFA for their life changing work. We wish them every success in this exciting, positive new initiative.
