Author Shares AMPATH Book with Kenyans Featured
Indiana University Media School Professor Jim Kelly spent the spring of 2019 in Eldoret interviewing, photographing and telling the stories of people who are integral to AMPATH's work. This included leaders, community workers and other unheralded individuals who are at the heart of AMPATH.
This summer, Professor Kelly travelled back to Kenya to share books with the people he profiled and shared his thoughts on the experience. Professor Kelly will also be a featured storyteller at this year's Tusker Tales event in Indianapolis.
Media School professor Jim Kelly shares copies of his book with some of the people who are featured.
There’s nothing quite like going to Kenya, giving people a book written about them and their work and then listening to them praise you for your effort. As everyone who has worked with the AMPATH partnership in Eldoret knows, people there are generous with compliments and gratitude.
For two weeks in July, I stayed at IU House and ventured out to deliver copies of the book I had spent my 2019 Fulbright sabbatical researching and photographing: From AIDS to Population Health: How an American University and a Kenyan Medical School Transformed Healthcare in East Africa.
I was delivering the books to the many people who shared their stories with me four years earlier. Without their stories, I would have had no story worth telling.
I caught up with CEO Dr. Wilson Aruasa in his office in the MTRH Chandaria Cancer and Chronic Diseases Centre just after he completed rounds in the hospital. I interrupted a meeting of the Moi University administrative staff to present a copy to Vice Chancellor Isaac Kosgey at the School of Medicine Guest House across the street. And the next morning I sneaked into Professor Sylvester Kimaiyo’s AMPATH Centre office at 8 a.m. just before his first meeting of the day and then into Professor Winstone Nyandiko’s office just around the corner. All were happy for me to sign their copies. Dr. Aruasa said his sons had read the book and then told him they didn’t really know what he did at work until they’d read the book. Prof. Kimaiyo said he’d gotten a copy from Adrian Gardner a few weeks earlier, but that he’d donated it to the Moi Library so was happy to have a signed copy of his own.
It was nice to meet with the leaders who had supported my project from the beginning, but it was even more gratifying to meet with the folks I call the “worker bees.” And yes, I do love the honey from the Kerio Valley.
I gave a copy to each of the four peer counsellors from the Rafiki Centre for Excellence in Adolescent Health while we enjoyed lunch at St. Luke’s just around the corner from Rafiki. It had taken me the most time to gain the trust of these youth while doing the reporting, but they welcomed me back as if I was an absent uncle. The next day I had lunch with Pamela Were who had allowed me to tag along with her and her team for remote oncology screening clinics years earlier.
I next travelled e to Bungoma to see Kenneth Malaba. He was with the Family Preservation Initiative in 2019, but was now teaching agricultural science at Kibabii University. Then we traveled to Busia to have lunch with Anyara Papa, a microfinance official who had earlier taught me all about table banking and economic development. The day was completed with a visit with my “cover girl” Ebby Opisa, a local community leader living in the same house in Lumakanda where we’d once talked of the Chicks 4 Chicks program and surviving HIV/AIDS. She told me it was the second book she owns.
I also gave copies of the book to people who were friends to my wife Carol and me while we lived in Eldoret. They included Frankie Akute (PR for MTRH), Beryl Maritim (AMPATH Population Health), Allylah Msenya (AMPATH PR and my former Moi student), Hellen Achieng (Shoe4Africa), Dunya Kamara (IU House), Abraham Mulwo (my Fulbright supervisor at Moi U), Obi Okumu-Bigambo (my officemate and the Moi professor who agreed to partner with me in 2009). Plus, I deposited two copies in the Eldoret Public Library and another two at the Moi University library.
It was so much fun to give a gift to one person after another who was in the book and then listen to them tell me what a great guy I was while I repeatedly insisted that they were really the great guys and that’s why they are in the book.