Women in a remote area of Kenya travel great distances — sometimes on foot, sometimes with small children — for surgery to repair obstetrical injuries and for treatment of a neglected tropical disease endemic to Baringo County.
Northeastern students Abigail Binkley and Abigail Williams spent their fall semester in Kenya on co-ops that explored the ways education and culture can help prevent the medical crises from occurring in the first place.
“The preventative approach and the educational approach are going to (bring about) the biggest changes in the community,” says Williams, a fourth-year student majoring in evolutionary biology and anthropology.
For their co-ops, Williams and Binkley, a third-year student majoring in biology with a minor in global health, held research positions at the TERMES Center in Chemolingot that was established several years ago by Northeastern professor and global health expert Richard Wamai.
Binkley focused on the burden of the neglected tropical disease visceral leishmaniasis among women of the Pokot tribe of childbearing age, 12 to 49 years.
“I’m looking at social, cultural, biological and environmental factors that might increase their risk of getting it,” Binkley says.
Williams focused on obstetric fistula and similar gynecological injuries that stem from childbirth, conducting in-depth interviews with six of 15 women who underwent surgical repairs at Chemolingot Sub Hospital in April, which was the first time the local hospital had offered the procedure.
