Anne Guion is a pediatric nurse who is volunteering with CMMB in Kenya. Before joining CMMB, she worked as an acute care pediatric nurse in urban Chicago focusing on the healthcare of low-resource families. She is especially interested in the effects of resource distribution on chronic disease and the application of unique healthcare models in specific populations to improve patient outcomes.

The following are excerpts of several different posts where Anne shares her ideas, thoughts, and ponderings. She gives us much to think about and then asks for our help with a very important project.

I want to fall in love with life again. People ask me over and over what I was thinking when I accepted my volunteer placement in Kenya. I wanted to serve, but I had personal reasons too. I had a great life in Chicago. An amazing job, wonderful friends who were (and still are) family, beautiful patients that I laughed and cried with every day.

But something was missing.

I was always looking for something. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and look out my window over the city and just wonder: what is it? Sometimes I would just drive and drive and not speak to a single person all day. I would ride my bike in Lake Geneva. I would walk out onto the cement piers that stretched out over the icy lake and just look at the expanse that was the sky and I would wonder: what am I doing? Why am I here?

And that’s when I decided to say goodbye to my life in Chicago and all the comforts I was accustomed to, to embark on this adventure as a volunteer with CMMB.

If you have never been to Kenya or any developing country for that matter, it’s hard to imagine how difficult life is. Life here takes a great deal more effort.

But every day, I live.

I had a great day yesterday. I saved a life. I laughed. I cried. I had faith. I boosted someone’s confidence and worked as a team. I did something new.

I took the matatu to point B and saw the most beautiful flowers along the way. I walked alone to the market and got to see the kids who went to school together sharing a popsicle with the green juice dripping from their laughing mouths into the dirt. I went grocery shopping and did everything I needed to do in Swahili. I met a new friend while doing my laundry.

I lived today – and I think I loved it.

A Matatu or minibus. A very common way for people to get from point A to point B

A Matatu or minibus. A very common way for people to get from point A to point B

 Starting From Scratch

No one can start from scratch. As much as we would like to, we can’t forget what has already happened or redo time. What we can do, is choose to rise to our known challenges and meet those unknown with courage and positivity. This is what I want to do.

Millions of people around the world, including Kenyans, live without access to ANY healthcare. I’m not just talking about emergency care. I’m talking about NO access. No vaccines. No simple medications. No safe births. And recently in Kenya, an already challenging system of healthcare has been further impacted by a doctor’s strike.

I work in a private hospital, and sometimes I can’t sleep because I’m thinking of the flood of patients we are now serving. I think of the people, many of them babies, many of whom I care for, who are not able to receive the care they need and deserve.

I look at the little girl whose blood count shows 99% blasts to whom I can’t give lifesaving chemotherapy. When I look at her, I imagine a different future. I imagine a world where she WON’T die. A world where her family WON’T grieve her loss and I imagine the possibility of her growing up to change the very face of world she lives in.

If she had been born into a world of accessible healthcare, all of this could have happened. But it didn’t.

I look again and I see an eight-month-old baby, who – if her seizure activity resulting from infectious meningitis could have been properly controlled – would have been learning how to walk right about now. She would have been discovering the wonderful world we live in.

If she had been in the right time and right place with the right medication and right supplies, maybe she would be smiling at her parents right now. It could have happened, but it didn’t.

My name is Anne

My name is Anne and I have something I need your help with.

The current closure of the public healthcare system due to doctors being on strike is a major obstacle here in Kenya. We are entering our fourth month and crisis mode is our new form of normal. We have less than 200 ICU beds for 45.5 million people when our healthcare system is up and running. Now, we have between 60 and 100 ICU beds for 45.5 Million people.

I can call, and call, and call all day, all across the country looking for hospital beds for our babies and children and some hospitals won’t even pick up the phone anymore. So we do our best with what we have, and sometimes it goes well. But sometimes I have to tell parents that the future of their family is going to look drastically different.

help anne

The thing is, St. Francis has the capability to provide intensive care. We have nurses trained in ICU care. We have a gorgeous, brand new hospital building ready for use with adult and pediatric intensive care, and a plan to overhaul our current nursery to allow it to provide high dependency care. But…

this is where you come in.

I am currently trying to raise funds to buy desperately needed equipment for babies who may be our smallest patients, but are the ones who are going to have the largest impact on our community’s future. To show you how much I believe in this and to help get us started, I have personally donated $2,000 to purchase a CPAP machine, which will allow us to provide a higher level of respiratory support to our premature infants, neonates in respiratory distress, and children up to five years of age suffering from respiratory illnesses who are not being well supported on oxygen alone.

Hopefully, we will start saving lives by the end of this month! But I need your help.

I will end with the words of Mother Theresa:

“The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.“