Violence Scared Off These Islands’ Doctors, Now Health Care Arrives By Boat

The team is part of Safari Doctors, a nonprofit that makes monthly trips deep into the Lamu Archipelago on Kenya’s dazzlingly beautiful northern coast. The word “safari” means “to travel” in East Africa’s Swahili language ― and the dozen or so villages the team visits on each trip require a difficult journey. To reach their first destination, the mainland village of Kiangwe, they weave the boat through a maze of channels, mangrove forest and white sand beaches for two hours, then set up a makeshift clinic and treat as many people as they can before moving on, zigzagging across the sea and camping out under the stars for several nights.

“Safari Doctors are the only doctors we see,” said Fatuma Ahmed, 24, a mother of a wailing baby girl, waiting to see the medics in Kiangwe. The nearest hospital is days away ― too far to reach on her own, she said.

Since 2015, the Safari Doctors group has served a population of subsistence farmers, fishers and herders in a region that borders war-torn Somalia. Regular attacks inside Kenya by the Somali-led militants known as al-Shabab frightened off many of the doctors in Lamu County. Clinics have closed, leaving villagers without the tools they need to avoid diseases such as leprosy and polio. For some of the locals who came to meet the team on their October trip, these free monthly pop-up clinics are the difference between life and death.

“We could walk to Somalia from here,” Harrison Kalu, the team’s nurse, told HuffPost as he carefully put two drops of polio vaccine into the mouth of a crying toddler in Kiangwe. Somalia has struggled to contain a polio outbreak due to low vaccine coverage. The disease spreads quickly among unvaccinated children and can cross country borders with human travelers, warns the World Health Organization. Under these circumstances, the WHO recommends that health professionals in Kenya monitor vulnerable communities and keep distributing vaccines.

“Without vaccinations, people would really suffer,” said Kalu, 67, a former member of the Kenyan navy who has worked as a nurse for almost 50 years. As a staffer for Safari Doctors, he directs the organization’s teams in the field.