Here’s how you can meet Kinyera Denish, a Ugandan community health worker…
Step 1: Take a 12 hour bus ride from Kampala, Uganda’s capital, to Moroto in north-eastern Karamoja Region.
Step 2: If you’re lucky, the road will be dry: in that case, drive the 3.5 hours to Amudat town, the major ‘town’ of the Amudat District (pop. around 300). If the road is wet, double the time in which you expect to reach the town, and prepare for the possibility that you may not being able to reach it at all.
Step 3: Drive another hour to Alakas Health Clinic.
There, after your 16-plus hour journey, you will find Denish, a community health worker and comprehensive nurse. Denish is the second in charge of the Alakas health facility.
It is common for me to visit such health clinics in my role as a volunteer with the Stop Transmission of Polio (STOP) program. The purpose of these visits is to check in on how they are going in their efforts to protect children against polio and to improve immunisation rates more broadly.
Within the first three minutes of meeting Denish he has conversed in three languages and I am sure he has more up his sleeve. He is from the same northern region as my UNICEF counterpart (language 1), he converses with me in English (language 2) and he has fluently picked up the local language (language 3) where he has served for just over a year.
As with most of our visits, I start with some basic questions about the make-up of the community he serves and their attitude to immunisation and other health services.
Denish not only has very informed answers, answering on behalf of the person in-charge of the health facility (who is away for a meeting that day), but he shows me all manner of charts, maps and more. He apologises for not being able to show me one chart because his marker ran out and he hasn’t been able to travel the 4.5 hours to Moroto to replace it yet!
Denish emits a confidence and genuine sense of knowledge and understanding of the community he serves. This service often includes long journeys by motorbike and foot to outlying areas. He tells me of his regret that he hasn’t been able to reach one particularly hard-to-reach community for two weeks, since the road had become impassable due to flooding:
“I was on one side and the community were waiting for me on the other,” he said, “but there was nothing we could do.”
I did suggest he could have loaded syringes with measles vaccine and javelined them across the river to land in the thighs of unvaccinated 9-month olds, but of course I was joking.
Denish is someone who probably doesn’t receive many accolades for his service, he probably doesn’t make a lot of money, he is away from his family base, he has limited access to power and I am sure works as hard as any other health care worker in this world.
But Denish is one of the key cogs in the machine that is not only on the path to eradicating polio but saving lives in the community he serves. Each and every day he is providing children with the best starting opportunity in life. I would love to say Denish is one of a kind, and he is, but also he is not. The vast majority of the health workers in these remote areas and all over the country are incredibly dedicated, experienced and knowledgeable. They face challenges with ideas and action rather than giving up.
Denish, thank you for your service to your community, country and the world – health workers like you are the true heroes of polio eradication. You are improving the lives of the poorest and helping us to see an eventual end to extreme poverty.
- By d’Arcy Lunn, STOP volunteer and “Resident Nomad” for The End of Polio campaign. See the original post and find out more about d'Arcy's experiences in Uganda here.
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Be sure to support Denish and the campaign to see free telecommunications for 1 million Sub-Saharan community health workers.