The work of Sister Pat Patton in Loitokitok, Kenya, is one of the hundreds of ways in which Medical Mission Sisters around the world try to be a healing presence to those in need today.

Sister Pat, a nurse, began her missionary work in Africa in the 1950s. "In 1982, after 35 years of clinical nursing and nursing administration, my life took a radical change," she recalls. "I had become interested in Community Based Health Care, and when Bishop Davies invited me to establish a program in the diocese of Ngong, I accepted."

Ngong Diocese covers most of the tribal lands of the Masai people, a semi-nomadic group living along the Kenya-Tanzania border. Sister Pat and her counterpart, a Masai woman named Helen, began with the settlement of Namelok as the target group.

"We visited each woman in the community and asked her about the family health problems and the local community problems," she explains. "When we finished the interviews, we compiled the answers and presented them to the community." The disease problems included malaria and TB. Basic needs that emerged were: reducing the number of flies, and finding an economical way of using water to wash the children's hands and faces. After the issues were identified, the people of Namelok then selected the women and men they wanted to be trained as Community Health Workers (CHWs).

"We made the initial contact with the first group," Sister Pat recalls. "After that we worked closely with one Irish priest who does the Masai apostolate ... he'd come and say there's a group who wants to know what you're teaching now. And it spread that way." In the past 22 years, 300 CHWs have been trained.