Meet Lucy

We met Lucy years ago at Tenwek Mission Hospital in Kenya. She is a young widow with two boys. Ron trained her to do echocardiography. which she did for years at Tenwek hospital. Her salary was not enough to support her and send her boys to a good school so she left Tenwek and worked for a Chinese company doing ECHO’s. That company shut down during COVID and she found herself unemployed.

Having no “formal training” and no official certificate she was unemployable by the government hospitals. When we heard of her situation we contacted Kapsowar Mission Hospital that we have been working with to start a RHD screening program and suggested that they hire her to run the program. Ron negotiated with the administration and they agreed that they would hire her with Lifestream Foundation paying half of her salary for the first 5 years. She will be a blessing to the program and the people that she works with. We are so happy that God sent her where she will be used to serve Him by caring for her people.

Lifestream Foundation is also helping with the boys school fees. If you would like to help you can go to the give section on the home page.

Kenya March 2022

We completed our time out at the small Kapsowar Mission hospital in northwestern Kenya where our focus was training that hospital group in basic cardiology and working with their Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) school screening program. We now have traveled south to Eldoret and the 1000 bed Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) .  It provides service to millions of patients with no or minimal insurance. Here we met up with 3 more members of our team, total of 7, to teach procedures that treat severe mitral stenosis, a progressive narrowing of the mitral valve which kills thousands of young Kenyan’s, predominately women, in their adolescence or early adulthood.

While we were at Kapsowar, Perpetua came for her follow-up visit. She is doing very well and has grown inches since we were here in November.

Below is our team working with the Kenyan team learning the procedure.   The C shaped x-ray machine wraps around the patient allowing us to visualize the wires and catheters in the heart.   10-15 people in the room to learn their roles was not unusual.  The staff at this public hospital appreciated praying for the patient pre-procedure.

 The following picture is Colleen working with the OR staff nurse, Alice, teaching the multiple tasks that she does to keep the patient safe and make procedural equipment available.  She and her team are the first to identify instability as they work with anesthesia to keep ahead of problems during the case.  She is loved and appreciated by the staff and is considered the “mother nurse”

Dr Akwanalo , in the photo below is doing a case with me and intently following the catheters in the heart on the fluoroscopy screen.   When I was a young doctor, he was a hard working rural Kenyan school boy bringing water up from the river to sprinkle on the dusty, dirt floor of his elementary school.   He is now a Kenyan board certified cardiologist and doing this difficult mitral valve dilation procedure with minimal help.

 Eunice and Mary (picture taken with permission) one day post-procedure. Mary, on the right was the sickest   weighing only 70 lbs. at age 23.  Her heart could no longer effectively circulate nutrients to nourish her cells even though food was available to her (a condition we call cardiac cachexia).  Note her stick thin arms. Her 2 hour procedure was successful and she will gain weight and strength quickly. 

 Our final picture is with most of the US team and Kenyan cardiology team.  Looks like we are getting out of jail but this is the supply room next to our cardiology theater (OR) room.   We are scheduled to return again to MTRH in November and after that teaching trip they should be fairly independent with this procedure.  We have great group of young US cardiology specialist who come on these trips to share training.

 Colleen and I get an opportunity to pray with these patients and encourage them to make a difference in the world around them with the extended lives they now have.   We are grateful to God for this opportunity to encourage the multicounty teams and the wonderful patients.  Grace and peace,   R and C

Kenya November 2021

With the generous help of our church and a team dedicated to the mission. We had an overwhelmingly successful mission to Kenya. It all started with collecting and sterilizing equipment that we would need.

Eileen Nemec and Sarah Sidler helped Ron and I sterilize donated equipment for the trip.

Screening for Rheumatic Heart Disease in Kapsowar Kenya

We were able to begin the training of screeners at Kapsowar Hospital, a small mission hospital in northwest Kenya. Once trained, they will be doing community screening at local schools.

Nurse Liz Koleski will be heading up the program

With the new trainees we were able to screen 154 young people. We identified 4 that will go on monthly penicillin to prevent progression of their disease and one young lady who we would see in Eldoret for a balloon valvuloplasty because of the severity of her disease. The Kapsowar screening program will take time and resources to be up and running. They are still in need of a fully functioning portable ECHO machine. In the mean time they are going through the ECHO course put together by Henry Zong Cardiac Ultrasound expert at Mbingo Hospital in Cameroon and administered by Eileen Nemec, Pediatric Echo Specialist at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis.

This is Perpetua with her mother. We first met Perpetua in Kapsowar when we were doing RHD screening at her school.

Perpetua is 13 years old. She’s a smart girl doing well in school. her favorite subject is math. She is know around the school as the girl who walks slow. For those of you who understand, her valve area was .8 and her gradient was 19 at a heart rate of 76. It’s no wonder she walks slowly. She was a perfect candidate for the balloon procedure. We arranged to her come to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret.

Our team outside of Moi Teaching and referral Hospital. Right to left, Ron Johannsen, Amit Sharma, Gautam Reddy, Eileen Nemec, Ahmad Younes, Colleen Johannsen, Stephanie El Hajj, Kelsey Sharma.

assessing patients for Balloon procedure.

Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, MTRH is a public hospital in Eldoret Kenya which serves the poor. They have been interested in starting a Balloon Valvuloplasty (PTMC) program for some time. This will be the first in a series of trips to train the MTRH cardiologists to do the procedure independently.

Dry lab demonstration of the PTMC process.

Cath lab crowded with teaching and learning

Perpetua after her very successful procedure. She should now be able to live a full life. We are so blessed to participate in this work.