Huntsville Hospital staffer gives gift of hope to Kenyan orphanage

May 01, 2006

By Lucy Ament

National Hospital Week, May 7-13, will give us an opportunity to celebrate the men and women who work in the nation’s hospitals. Their dedication to people and communities also is recognized in our recurring series, “the Heart of Health Care,” which looks inside hospitals for the human hearts that keep them beating.

At the Marindi Children’s Home of Grace in Migori, Kenya, a spry 10-year-old girl named Mercy likes to sing a poem about her future: I go to Kowino Primary School/My teachers say I’m clever/My friends say I’m beautiful/They say I’m going to be a doctor/I will work very hard to be a doctor.

But for Mercy, who has full-blown AIDS, the future is not bright. Though she recently survived a month in the hospital simultaneously battling pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhoid and malaria, she cannot stave off her sickness long enough to realize her dreams.

Steve James, a nurse anesthetist at Huntsville (AL) Hospital who started the orphanage where Mercy and 95 other children live, knows the tragedy of a young, promising life cut short: in 2001, his 19-year-old daughter Brittney died suddenly while at college in North Carolina.

But James also knows that great good can come from loss, for it was during a trip to Kenya to visit Newton, an impoverished child Brittney had supported through a Christian charity during the years before her death, that James found a way to help hundreds in need.

James was shaken by the crippling poverty and primitive, unsanitary conditions of the health care facilities he saw in Kenya. He returned to Alabama and established the Brittney James Child Fund (recently renamed Kenya Relief) to collect money, goods and medical equipment to send back to the country.  His first projects involved piping water to Newton’s village in Naromoru and donating several tons of surplus medical equipment from Alabama’s Cullman Regional Medical Center and Woodland Medical Center to Ojele Hospital in Migori, where newborns were being swaddled in bubble wrap because baby blankets were too costly.

But James was haunted by memories of a man named Victor who, dying of AIDS, had asked James to care for his two children when they became orphans. James decided to help the two children and others like them by building the Marandi orphanage in Migori, located in the province of Nyanza. Two years later, the orphanage sits on 21 acres and boasts two dormitories, the “Brittney House” for visiting relief workers, a cow barn and chicken house, and a new library. A 5,600-square foot facility is under construction and will provide fundamental health, eye and dental care for the community with help from volunteer clinicians from the U.S.

The orphanage provides much-needed food, shelter, medicine and education for its little charges, who were selected from hundreds of applicants because their circumstances were the most dire. There are 200 children on the orphanage’s waiting list – barely a fraction of Nyanza’s 80,000 orphans, 95% of whom were orphaned by AIDS.

In Huntsville, James is a frequent speaker at fundraising events hosted by local civic groups and churches to help build support for the orphanage. He says U.S. hospitals can make a big difference for those in Kenya still waiting for help. In their efforts to provide state-of-the-art care, he notes, American hospitals routinely replace equipment that still works well. These retired materials would prove invaluable in third-world countries.

“There are enough supplies in all the hospitals across America that Kenya’s health care problems could be substantially reduced if people would just share their excess,” said James, who notes that clinicians as far away as Minnesota and Missouri are collecting medical equipment to be donated through Kenya Relief (www.kenyarelief.org).

This spirit of giving has had a profound effect locally, too. James said anesthetists at Huntsville Hospital have sponsored 17 of the Marindi orphans and others have been sponsored by the hospital’s Department of Medical Records and by the weekend surgical crews.

“You can see the change [at the hospital]. It’s something that connects us,” said James. “Our group provides hope for a new generation of Kenyans through cooperation between communities."

This article 1st appeared in the May 1, 2006 issue of AHA News