Kaiser Permanente Team Forges Ties With Africa

One question from his 11-year-old son galvanized Kaiser Permanente Walnut Creek emergency room doctor Charles Clemons to help improve Zimbabwe's ailing health care system and to better the lot of orphans and poor children in Zambia.

Vincent Mubita, who is holding his sister's hand, is the child from Zambia whom Robert Clemons is sponsoring.

"I want to help," said the boy, Robert, after learning about Zimbabwe at his school's International Night. "I'll give all the money in my wallet. Will you match it?"

The sixth-grader's $33.18 donation went to the Pediatrics AIDS Fund, a program run by the J.F. Kapnek Trust, a Lafayette based nonprofit dedicated to alleviating Zimbabwe's AIDS epidemic.

The conditions in Zimbabwe are dire: Out of a population of 13 million people, an estimated 1.1 million to 2.2 million have HIV, according to a United Nations 2006 Report on AIDS released in May. There are 1.1 million children in Zimbabwe who are orphaned because their parents died of AIDS.

Dr. Clemons wrote a check, but he didn't want to stop there. "I thought we could do more," he said.

So last fall, Dr. Clemons, his 27-year-old daughter, Alison, and a former Kaiser Permanente colleague, Ron Fischer, MD, traveled to Zimbabwe and Zambia, impoverished nations in southern Africa. In addition to the AIDS epidemic, they saw Zimbabwe's out-of-control inflation, unraveling infrastructure, and scarce basic medical supplies.

"What struck me was this incredible imbalance of resources," Dr. Clemons said. "We in America are somewhat insulated from this reality. If we could just provide basics, we can make a difference."

After two weeks, Dr. Clemons returned home inspired to help supply Zimbabwe's medical school with books, bring expertise to the Harare Central Hospital in Zimbabwe, and assist the poor children and AIDS orphans in Zambia.

One of the first steps after he returned was to work with Lynn Van Houten, librarian at the Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center and then peer group leader, to mobilize the librarians from the 19 Kaiser Permanente Northern California Health Sciences libraries to donate old but still useful textbooks. An estimated 900 to 1,200 books streamed in from all over Northern California.

For the next trip to Africa in May, Dr. Clemons assembled a diverse group of Kaiser Permanente employees, emissaries to help the efforts take hold region wide.

The team included Van Houten; Jim Shively, MD, an orthopedic surgeon who recently retired from the Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center; Paul Preston, MD, of the San Francisco Medical Center's Anesthesiology Department; and Karen Kruger, MD, of the Pediatrics Department at the Richmond Medical Center. They returned from their three-week journey in early June.

Before they left, Dr. Kruger sent an e-mail to everyone at the Richmond facility asking for donations. She received an overwhelming response; the largesse filled her office ten times over with surgical supplies, computers, toys, and clothes.

Once in Africa, Dr. Kruger spent time at the Central Hospital's Pediatric ward, doing more reconnaissance. In addition to addressing teaching and training needs, she would like to help them build a play room, which would benefit the children's "physical, emotional and cognitive development."

Meanwhile, Van Houten was with the college librarians talking about how else Kaiser Permanente can help on that front.

And Drs. Preston and Shively were working with doctors at the Harare Central Hospital to operate on a dozen children who were born with orthopedic deformities that are commonly fixed here during infancy.

"In Zimbabwe the poor economy has caused many health care professionals to leave the country"
Dr. Shively

"There are seven orthopedic surgeons in the entire country— seven for 13 million people," he said. "They are obviously overwhelmed. When we arrived there were hundreds of kids to be taken care of."

Most of the group also traveled to Zambia to meet and photograph the children whom some of them are sponsoring for $18 a month through the Kansas City based Children International, a nonprofit humanitarian organization helping impoverished children worldwide.

Rather than place children in orphanages, Dr. Clemons is working with Children International to keep as many as possible in their extended families and anchored to their language and culture. The way to do that is to drum up more sponsors, he said. So he is designing a classroom program, first tested in Lafayette public and private schools, to sponsor kids.

Robert, now 12, said he is surprised by how the initial donation has blossomed into a multi-faceted project.

"If this reaches its full potential," he said, "great things can happen."

You can sponsor a child at Children International or call (800) 888-3089.