Kenyans shunning medical help in favour of prayer
NAIROBI, KENYA—An explosion of charismatic churches, some with "cult-like" characteristics, is threatening to undermine the mission of Kenya's church-sponsored healthcare services.
Christian churches in Kenya contribute at least 40 per cent of healthcare services in the country. But the country is seeing a dramatic increase, especially among poor populations, of people shunning medical treatment in favour of prayers for healing, claiming that Jesus never advocated for conventional medical treatment.
The movement is hurting the HIV/AIDS campaigns of both government and non-governmental organizations. In Kenya 1.4 million people—80 per cent of them women—live with the HIV virus.
Pastor Mathews Nyoteyo of the Seventh Day Adventist church in western Kenya says the health facilities run by his church are falling victim to "cult-like behaviour that has refused to die among our people."
"We were not meant to sit at our health facilities and wait for patients, but rather to include outreach as part of our mission," Nyoteyo says.
"You feel it when you see somebody dying of a disease that can be relieved through medical treatment simply because of some strange belief," says Anne Mbogua, a clinician at a church-based health centre in Nairobi's Eastlands estate.
"It is not that we are short of patients, but our mission to reach out to everybody both with the spiritual message and physical healing is undermined when you have groups of people who refuse to get medical treatment," she says.
News reports earlier this year featured a middle-aged man, Peter Kariuki, who was seriously injured in an accident. He has refused to seek medical treatment, saying Jesus never believed in it and that with prayer he'll be healed.
"It is Jesus who said that anything we'll ask of Him, He'll do for us including those who seek for healing of their diseases," said Kariuki as he lay in pain on his bed at home in Ngong a few kilometers from Kenya's capital, Nairobi.
"Please leave us alone for we know that Jesus will heal him," said a relative who identified herself as Nyambura as they tried to eject journalists from their home.
This trend is causing concerns even among the medical fraternity in the country.
"When you tell somebody he is cured and no test has been done to prove it, they stop taking ARVs [antiretrovirals]. I have seen many whose condition deteriorated when they stopped taking drugs," says National Aids and Sexually Transmitted Diseases Control Programme Director Nicholas Muraguri.
"The healthcare facilities initiated by churches are not there merely to earn money for the churches but are also to be used to evangelize even as they seek to restore one's physical health," adds Nyoteyo.
The Seventh Day Adventist church is one of the many protestant and Catholic churches that operate close to 970 health facilities in Kenya. Among them are large and medium hospitals, health centers and dispensaries.
Canada's Education Medical Aid and Service (EMAS) says these church-based health facilities work alongside those run by the government to offer much needed healthcare services in a country where poverty is widespread. Fifty-six per cent of Kenyans live on the equivalent of less than $1 per day.
"Forty per cent of the poor cannot afford medical care when needed and over 50 per cent of the poor have no access to safe drinking water with malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS being widespread; prenatal and childbirth care virtually nonexistent," EMAS says in a report on its website.
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