Many years ago, Ziyana Popat and her family took vacation at the Mara in Narok. Her younger brother Kiyaan Popat, who was seven or eight, saw a little boy limping as he herded cows.
The boy appeared already beaten by life, walked barefoot and was out in the wild on a weekday, suggesting he was out of school. They were all concerned.
Ziyana told the Star her brother’s sympathy for the boy was infectious and the family pledged to do something, however small, to improve lives in the area.
“You just feel the human pain when a little child who should be in school fighting for a better future is missing the chance," Ziyana explained in a sit-down interview on Monday.
"If you can do something for the whole community, however long it takes, you take it up. That is what we were thinking,” she said.
Years later in 2014, their family business, LifeCare International, would mobilise other private businesses to hold medical camps in the area to help the community.
"At LifeCare International, we believe nothing is more important than your health and wellbeing, and a several-hundred kilometer commute for basic healthcare is an issue that needs to be addressed," she added.
Four medical camps since 2014 have treated 8,300 people mounted by the enterprise is not enough, Ziyana said.
The family is hoping to lean more into its networks to deal with root causes of most of the ailments afflicting the people in Narok.
In the first camp, 1,200 individuals, mainly old men, mothers and little children turned up and were treated.
The second and third camps were in 2018 and 2019, treating 1,600 and 2,400 residents, respectively.
This year, the free medical camp ran on November 28 and 29.
About 3,100 people, again, mainly mothers and children. turned up.
As their business grew for close to 30 years, it has acquired international status, setting up operations in the UAE and Qatar, besides Kenya.
Ziyana said the international growth of their business has helped them develop networks which they leverage on the ground to mount the camp and give back to the society by way of the medical camp.
Medical services cover paediatrics, gynaecology, diabetes and hypertension, ENT, ECG, optical, dental and GP consultations.
There were 109 total surgeries, including 43 tumour removals, 63 cataracts, and three cleft lip reconstructions, in addition to 180 dental patients and 800 optical patients.
The camps were in three locations: Sekenani Medical Center in Narok South, Enkitoria Oloolaimutia Medical Center in Narok West and in Talek Medical Center.
“We have analysed most of the illnesses that people turning up for the camps suffer from and the running thread is water-borne infections,” she said.
Effectively, she said, the intervention through the camps is just a temporary fix. They want to sink boreholes in the area to ensure the pastoralist community gets a reliable source of clean water for domestic use.
“It is something we have taken on as a family that over the new year, we will source more partners to help put up boreholes for clean domestic water for the local community,” she said. She stressed the commitment of the company’s leadership and her family to sustaining the vision.
It will not just end in boreholes, she said, the ultimate goal and hope is to put up a medical facility to help address recurrent medical issues.
In the meantime, Ziyana said, the camp deployed telemedicine to provide quality medical consultancy to the patients. They were connected to the doctors through HealthX, a remote consultancy system.
Narok Governor Patrick Ole Ntutu, who stopped at the centres with local politicians in tow, said the camp had helped families who could otherwise not afford quality medical care.
He said that as a community, the Lifecare medical camp in the Mara had done a lot for them in the past few years.
"Otherwise, many of the children and women here would not have got this healthcare," Ntutu said.
"The best specialists we’ve seen here are doing all sorts of operations and treating all sorts of diseases. This camp has changed lives, and the community is very happy.”
(Edited by V. Graham)