How Do We Help Her?
A STORY FROM OUR INTERNATIONAL MISSIONARY DR. STEVE LETCHFORD
A few years ago, I was on call at Kijabe Hospital, one of Africa’s biggest mission hospitals. It was 4 am and the baby girl on the table in the emergency room was named Mumbi, a 7-day old little girl who lived 45 minutes away.
Not long after Mumbi was born she started vomiting. Her mom was very poor and so she waited, hoping the vomiting would stop by itself. But it didn’t, and on day 3 when Mumbi was getting sicker, her mom took her to a little clinic near her house to see the nurse.
There is no doctor there - there almost never is in the poorest villages and slums. That little clinic was doing the best it could. The nurse gave Mumbi’s mother a pink antibiotic. It’s what they had; it’s what they knew how to do. But it was nowhere close to what Mumbi needed. It was the wrong diagnosis and the wrong treatment. The clock was ticking.
On Day 7 when something was terribly wrong with this little girl, her mom in desperation showed up at Kijabe at 4am. But two hours later, as the sun came up, despite doing everything we could do, Mumbi died.
Her mom, who had been standing next to me for those two hours, just sobbed.
I asked myself that morning what I always ask, “God help me, what if she was my child. What if she was my granddaughter? What if taking one of my kids to the hospital meant that I wouldn’t have enough money left to feed my other four children at home?”
Lucy, the head nurse on duty, asked what she always asks: “What did we do well? What could we have done better?” The team had done everything well that night; it was just too late. What we could have done better was to find a way to help that little clinic that saw Mumbi before it was too late.
Mumbi almost certainly had a problem that Kijabe Hospital’s pediatric surgery, anesthesia and ICU team could have fixed with a high rate of cure if she had come the first day or two. And Kijabe Hospital already had funding through a program for needy families called Watsi that would have paid 100% of the costs for Mumbi’s diagnosis. A 4-question screening tool already existed that would have confirmed in 20 seconds that Mumbi’s family qualified for that Watsi funding.
And Mumbi went to a clinic that was only 45 minutes away. That little clinic just needed help making the right diagnosis quickly and getting Mumbi onto a motorcycle with her mom to come to Kijabe, knowing that the bills would be paid and someone would be there to help her. In the 21st century, there isn’t a piece of that story that technology can’t help us solve immediately.
But for the desperately poor, there is no paying market to drive innovation for a use case like Mumbi’s, so no one has done it yet. Banda Health, a ministry of the Society for International Ministries (SIM) mission organization, is working to de-risk the innovations that are needed to make technology work where it is needed the most. We are asking and answering the question, “What will it look like when we can truly help a patient like Mumbi get the right diagnosis and the right treatment at the right time with the right funding, even though she was born into a world with the absolutely wrong socioeconomic profile?”
Today, Banda’s technology solution supports over 190 frontline clinics in slums and villages across 5 countries, serving 1.1 million patients annually with 3 million total visits to date.
Very early on our journey, as I was getting to know these little clinics in the slums, I met a clinical officer named Rebecca who opened my eyes to the wider reality. Two of us had just spent 3 hours sitting with Rebecca in her little one-exam-room, one-pharmacy-window clinic on a muddy backstreet in Nairobi’s slums sorting out how our early version of BandaGo could work in her setting. I was excited by what technology could do to help her battling away with so few resources. But at the end of 3 hours, she looked at me with a sense of desperation and said, “Doctor, what am I going to do? I just delivered my 15th baby to a mother who initially sought an abortion. I talked with her and helped her see that God made and loved that baby. But now that she’s had the baby, she has nowhere to go. She can’t go back to school; she is staying with her sister; and she has no way to get a job or money. How do I help her?”
“What about that little church around the corner?” I asked.
“Doc, they don’t know what to do.”
I didn’t know either, but I had friends who did.
Out of that came Banda’s 2nd priority strategy: proactively building ministry partnerships to strengthen local believers and churches to address the overwhelming social and spiritual realities in their communities.
Today, we are working with 22 ministry partners to train and strengthen believers in 3 areas – proclaiming the Gospel in very spiritually vulnerable settings, equipping them with the leadership and discipleship training they need, and empowering them to care for the vulnerable - orphans, domestic violence survivors, the economically destitute, and more. Over 25% of our supported tech-empowered patient visits are with partners in least-reached people groups. Through these partnerships, Banda Health is helping to bring the hope of the Gospel to distressed and desperate communities – hope for today and hope for eternity.
ABOUT STEVE AND SHERRI LETCHFORD
After working in U.S. private practice, Dr. Steve and Sherri Letchford moved to Africa with their family to live and work at two mission hospitals in Zambia and Kenya for 25 years. They are passionate about young African healthcare professionals knowing and serving Christ and making Him known amongst the poor and the economically and spiritually vulnerable.
Today, they lead SIM’s Banda Health ministry, which brings Christ’s love to vulnerable and exploited communities in Africa’s slums and villages, using technology to empower the clinics that care for the sick, and ministry partnerships to strengthen the local believers and churches who bring good news to the despairing. Second Baptist has supported Steve and Sherri since they left for Africa in 1998 and provided the initial $50,000 grant in 2012 that launched Banda Health.