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He didn't know where God was leading, only who needed help
By Kinya Kaunjuga with Indimuli White
White! White! White!
It always caught him off guard when a crowd chanted his name.
He still wasn’t used to it.
His name had its own story. Before he was born, his father became so sick that the village medicine man could do no more. He walked into the forest, where those beyond healing went to await death. When he didn’t die, he kept walking. Along the way, people told him of a place where sick people sometimes returned home. Days later, he reached the hospital where a missionary named Dr. White saved his life. In gratitude, he named his son after the man who had given him another chance.
For twenty-two years, White’s world had been small enough: keeping his clinic open and raising his family. He had never imagined standing before a crowd, let alone one calling his name.
Even now, it felt impossible that the unfinished room he had rented to open a clinic had become a four-storey building in Africa’s largest slum.
As he looked across the hall, he did not see supporters. He saw neighbors, patients, mothers and fathers, and young adults he had delivered as babies. He thought of newborns rescued from pit latrines after failed abortions, carried into his clinic by neighbors hoping someone could save them.
Many in the hall had first come to know him in moments of fear, grief and hope. They knew that whether it was midday or the middle of the night, his clinic door—just like the one on his home—was one they could knock on for treatment, counsel or simply someone who would not turn them away. For White and his family, there was rarely such a thing as being off duty.
For the first time in years, he could leave the clinic without worrying it would close without him. His daughter had finished nursing school and was now deputizing him, caring for many of the same families she had watched him serve for years. That gave him the freedom to accept the community’s request to run for the county assembly as the representative of their ward. They believed he could carry their voices to government without losing the compassion that had earned their trust over the decades.
As a young clinical officer, White moved to Nairobi in search of a job. He was surprised to discover that the money he had saved could only afford to rent a small tin room in a slum. As he searched for work, he quickly came to understand why families living there could not afford the city’s large hospitals. Each morning he left to look for employment. Each evening, when he returned, there was often a knock at his door. A neighbor needed medicine for a feverish child. A woman had gone into labor and needed help delivering her baby. Someone else needed a wound cleaned and dressed.
Before long, he realized he had stopped looking for a job. The community had already found work for him.
A slum landlord had watched him care for residents and offered him an unfinished stone room to use as a clinic. Instead of continuing his search for employment, he accepted her offer and opened a clinic along the busy road that separates the slum from the rest of Nairobi.
Everyone living in Mathare eventually passed that road. It was the gateway to the rest of the city—for work, for supplies, for opportunity. He hoped the steady stream of people would be enough to keep the clinic going.
As the years passed, people came looking for more than medicine.
As addiction tightened its grip on the slum, neighbors began bringing those who were struggling to White, trusting he would know what to do. He connected many of them with a colleague at a government psychiatric hospital, where they could receive subsidized treatment. Over time, many slowly recovered lives that had begun to unravel.
The clinic also became a refuge for mothers. Without the clinic, countless women would have given birth on the mud floor of their homes, a plastic bag cut open beneath them and a neighbor whose only experience was giving birth the same way. Instead, weeks later they returned with their babies in their arms for their first vaccinations.
Over the years, the clinic became known as one of the few places in Mathare where everyone had a place.
During gang clashes and political demonstrations, rival gangs stood on opposite sides of the road but left the clinic alone. Even the police, stationed there because of the violence, lowered their guard at the clinic. They did not fire tear gas or enter to arrest those seeking treatment.
From the day he opened the clinic, White had treated gang members whenever they were injured. In return, they quietly protected him and the place that cared for everyone—a protection that continues to this day.
Mathare is home to people from nearly every tribe in Kenya, and the divisions between them often run deep. White refused to let those divisions cross the clinic door. As a Christian, he intentionally built a team of Christian and Muslim staff. Before long, Muslim families came to know his clinic as a place where they would be welcomed and cared for.
Then came the devastating floods that swept through Nairobi, the worst the city had experienced in more than a hundred years. Families whose homes had disappeared beneath the floodwaters found refuge at the clinic. One expectant mother left the crowded government displacement camp and walked barefoot to White’s clinic while in labor.
She had chosen where she preferred her baby to be born.
At Banda, stories like White’s remind us that small neighborhood clinics are much more than places where people receive treatment. They are places they trust. By building technology that helps these clinics remain open and sustainable, Banda is investing in the people who make sure every community has a place to turn. Thank you for doing this with us.
You can read more about White’s journey in Protected by Gangs, We Dance, and The Black Belt Nurse.
Kinya Kaunjuga
Kinya, our corporate storyteller, is an Aggie, and has lived and worked in Africa, Asia and North America. She’s met people from almost every part of the world and believes everybody has a story worth listening to.