Ryan Chartrand“In Kenya, disease over there is totally different. We can sustain peoples’ lives here; there, they just die. They don’t have the facilities, so that’s what we are tying to provide,” said architecture senior Matthew Ridenour, one of two Cal Poly students planning on building a medical clinic in Africa as part of their senior project.
Ridenour and architecture senior David Aine are working on a joint senior project that they hope to start constructing in June of this year. The site will be in Namanga, a town two hours south of Nairobi, Kenya. It is nestled along the rim of Mount Kilimanjaro and the border of Tanzania.
Ridenour came up with the idea after becoming friends with former tribesman Moses Pulei at a Presbyterian church in Thousand Oaks. Pulei is now the chairman of Staff of Hope, a Christian group that helps communities in East Africa by building wells, starting schools and other projects.
“When I talked to (Pulei) about wanting to do something for Kenya, he said, ‘Why don’t you do a medical clinic?'” Ridenour said.
Pulei has been working with the Kenyan government to get approvals for the land and supplies that Ridenour and Aine will need to head the project.
“He has a lot of government ties; he talked to the president and the government gave us the site to work with,” Ridenour said.
The goal of the clinic is to bring medical assistance to the Masai people – who are one of the most traditional tribes left in Africa – of Masailand. The Masai currently have no access to medical care. The clinic will serve as a local distribution center for vaccines, and will have facilities for HIV testing, AIDS education, neonatal care and emergency medical treatment.
Ridenour said he’s excited to be working on this project because he feels the Masai people are underserved by the government.
“They are trying to resist getting their children educated and they are still semi-nomadic,” Ridenour said. “And because they don’t want to let Western influence or modern influences into their society, the government puts them on the back burner and they don’t get many social services or facilities like this…if they need medical attention, they can’t get it.”
With the new clinic, complete with a full-time staff and all the medicine and vaccinations needed to get started, Ridenour said the clinic will hopefully lead to others.
“If this clinic goes up and goes well, they want to reproduce it all over the country,” Ridenour said. “So that’s why we are trying to be as economical as possible.”
As of now, the team has raised $30,000 of the estimated $65,000 that is needed to complete the project. Most of the fundraising has been done through private donations and support letters.
Ridenour sent letters of support to friends and family to fund his trip to Kenya this summer.
“A group from my church is going at the end of June, right after graduation, for two and half weeks to start construction and just to be with the community over there,” Ridenour said.
The group will be working with a Kenyan construction company and local labor in effort to keep the project economically reasonable and minimize the “Western influence” a clinic like this could bring to the region for the building.
The land for the building was donated by tribal elders because they are ready for the benefits the clinic will bring, Ridenour said.
And with the support of the Masai people, Ridenour and Aine are trying to make the design fit in with the local environment by using the traditional Masai red and local building materials.
“We’re trying to make the building economical and reproducible by making the space inside really flexible to meet the need of the population now and as their needs change,” Aine said. “We have a regularized, structuralized system that can be easily manipulated and expanded upon. We are basically trying to create the building to integrate local knowledge of construction technique using local contractors and local labor…nothing too wild,” he added.
The clinic will have an open bay examination room that is similar to an emergency room, complete with curtains separating each examination table. There will also be two private exam rooms: a large one for emergency procedures, and another which is designated as the gynecology room for pregnant women and checkups.
“There’s a testing laboratory where they will be storing the blood samples and urine samples where they can later be sent to the hospital in Kenya for further testing,” Aine said. “There are restroom facilities and water facilities, and there are rooms for two full-time staff members to sleep at the clinic.”
Both Ridenour and Aine have visited Kenya before and have seen the need for this clinic firsthand. Aine mentioned that he’s trying to get more civil involvement in the architecture department.
“When both Matt (Ridenour) and I went to Kenya two years ago, we really came back with a big light bulb,” Aine said. “Just realizing that architecture can be used as a powerful tool to help people, I felt like we’d found the purpose of us studying architecture by transforming communities.”