This busy Okinga Health Center II treats on average 80 – 100 patients per day. We first visited the health center in September 2020 and one of the staff told us the month before they had seen 989 patients. We were surprised by the high volume until they explained that in the month before (July) they had served 1,225 patients. The most shocking thing about those statistics was that had treated all of those patients without their own source of clean water!
The staff explained that there was a well within walking distance but it had been drilled in a swamp that flooded every time it rained heavily. This meant that the area around the pump was often submerged under groundwater had been contaminated by livestock and human waste.
Nobody from the health center wanted to use that water because they did not consider it clean or healthy and they did not want to risk their patients’ lives by giving them unsafe water.
The Okinga staff were overjoyed when the health center finally got a well of its own.