Straw to Bread

Treating illness: from rearranging church benches to building a hospital

Our partnership for improving health started in 2009 when the first Straw to Bread team made a church into a clinic on the Plateau for two weeks with no electricity and no water.  The clinic became an annual way to serve, and we still see an average of one hundred patients a day with volunteer physicians when we go.  During the 2015 trip, we began to see patients in the unfinished, but magnificent, Bethlehem Home Hospital. 

Meanwhile…

Don Ogola grew up in a mud house in the middle of what was to become known as the Bethlehem Home community.  He was the fifth child of Pastor Habil Ogola and “Mama Faith,” the couple who leads Bethlehem Home and who, themselves, struggled to provide enough food for their family. As a boy, Don dreamed the impossible dream of going to medical school.  Thanks to his hard work in school and the generosity of an American woman who said, “I have too much,” Don did attend medical school at the University of Nairobi. 

During those years, his spirit was honed as finely as his mind, and he set out for home after finishing the best training Kenya has to offer.  Instead of following the “brain drain” to wealthier places, Dr. Ogola returned to serve gratefully in the beautiful new hospital that had been built while he was away.  With a desire to gain more knowledge and skills, Dr. Ogola returned to the University of Nairobi to specialize in Pediatrics. He has returned after three years to serve again at Bethlehem Home Hospital. Our goal is to have a residency-trained internal medicine doctor to complement Dr. Ogola’s expertise.

These days we have young physicians join our team to see patients alongside Dr. Ogola who have been coming on our trips since they were in college. Now fully trained, they return year after year.

Next Steps

We aspire to be a center of excellence in the region with the capability to do C-section deliveries, offer full Maternal and Child Health Services, and be a referral center for ultrasound diagnosis.  The purchase of a digital x-ray machine and an ambulance is our next goal.