Kildare charity steps in after Musk's wood-chipper

The sudden and notorious closure of USAID by Elon Musk last January — “I fed it into the wood-chipper,” the world’s richest man crowed — generated headlines and stories of the effect on poverty and sickness-stricken people around the world. But the effect was also felt in microcosm in Kilcullen, albeit at a remove, in Kenya.

Kilcullen is the locus of Maintain Hope, a charity described by its founder as ‘minuscule’ but which over almost three decades has brought hope and a future to children in the small area of Ngong, outside Nairobi. Most of the families it supports, through the generosity of people in the wider Kilcullen area, are in a community ravaged by HIV.

“We’re now back to the situation we had more than 20 years ago,” the charity's founder Gerry O’Donoghue told the Kildare Nationalist during a recent coffee morning fundraiser at the home of longtime supporters Esther Reddy and Joe Dooley and their family. 

“At that time, being HIV positive was highly stigmatised. Many, many Kenyans hid the disease from their relations and medical carers. Children were orphaned or abandoned because their mothers couldn’t or wouldn’t get treatments, and died. 

"But gradually, workshops in the slums and the availability of retroviral drugs helped these women to manage their condition and live full family lives.”

Peer-to-peer support through the workshops, from women who were themselves HIV positive, helped overcome stigma and saved lives. Checkups and RV drug pickups became as routine for many women as going to the shops. Probably 90 percent of the retroviral medicine came through USAID. 

“But, literally overnight, the clinics were closed,” said Gerry. “Kenyan workers were dismissed, and even American supervisors didn’t know if they had their flight money home. It was devastating.”

Maintain Hope was able to step into the gap and provide money to get the medicines for their families. But it’s a drop in the ocean. 

“There are thousands, countless others who don’t have anybody to turn to. It’s going to lead to a lot of unnecessary, preventable deaths. They’re now going back to that original cycle where children become motherless and fatherless and will be farmed out to various unsuitable accommodations, not least the children’s homes, which we’re trying to prevent.”

Founded in 2006 after Gerry visited an orphanage while on holiday in Kenya — “I had been planning just to go out for a beer, but somehow found myself in Ngong” — the charity currently supports 82 Kenyan children within their families to ensure they are healthy and can continue education through primary, secondary and even third level. 

There are now Maintain Hope graduates in nursing, teaching, computer science, marketing and languages, and some are also now starting to raise their own families.

Gerry regularly travels out at his own expense to check on progress, and in the coming month a dozen Kilcullen area volunteers are going to Ngong to help and assess how best to advance the work of the charity. 

It’s a revival of Maintain Hope’s volunteering programme of the early days, which helped to build facilities at the original children’s home Gerry had visited on that fateful holiday twenty years ago. 

“This time it’s about capacity building, liaising with the local people to see how future volunteers might best help out the children and the communities.”

Apart from the revival of the HIV crisis, the Ngong area and many other communities in the region have battled through a winter of cholera and typhus and other waterborne diseases caused by flooding and bad sanitation. 

“Thankfully, we had the resources, through the generosity of our supporters, to help our families. Because of the HIV issue, these otherwise treatable diseases could have taken many of them out. We had to postpone other projects and be very vigilant, but we’re now back on an even keel.”

Maintain Hope is a charity on a shoestring, funded by many small initiatives, and helping a small number of people in the larger scheme of things. But for every child aided to learn and live a fuller life, the beneficial ripple effect for the future of their families and community is beyond measure.

Each and all of whom have escaped Elon Musk’s wood-chipper.