Dr. Luke Bonnett will travel to Kenya as part of the Lwala Community Alliance.
While many people focus on giving back in their own community, one Columbia–area pediatrician is focused on giving back to a community more than 15,000 miles away.
Dr. Luke Bonnett of Chapin Pediatrics will be taking part in a two–week trip to Lwala, Kenya, as part of the Lwala Community Alliance. Bonnett will be providing care to patients in the Lwala Community Health Center. He will also conduct a neonatal recussitation session and lessons on asthma and respiratory diseases for the Lwala Clinic’s staff of about 25 Kenyans.
The Lwala Community Alliance is a community health program in Western Kenya. The organization was founded by Kenyan brothers Milton and Fred Ochieng’, who lost their parents to HIV while in college in the U.S. and took this as a call to action to provide access to primary care in their home village.
In April 2007, after three years of fundraising, the Lwala Community Health Center finally opened. The brothers’ story is the subject of the
documentary Sons of
Lwala and has been featured on ABC World News and CNN.
In the three years since the clinic has operated, more than 40,000 patients have been treated. Approximately 60 percent of those patients are children and 15 percent are HIV positive.
Dr. Bonnett won the trip at the Allscripts ACE client conference last year, where the Ochieng’ brothers were keynote speakers. Allscripts, the sponsor of the trip, is a Chicago– based healthcare information technology company.
For more information about the Lwala Community Alliance, visit www.lwalacommunityalliance. org.
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