Photo: Farhiya Hussein. Retrieved from eastleighvoice.co.ke
The residents of the remote island of Manda in Lamu County have decried the lack of a health facility in the area.
The residents are forced to cross over to Lamu’s main island to get medical services at the King Fahad County Referral Hospital as the dispensary within Manda lacks crucial drugs and personnel.
Manda is home to over 2,000 people, most of them stone miners and farmers who settled on the island from other parts of Lamu and Kenya in the 1980s.
The islanders have urged the county government to build more well-equipped dispensaries in the area to relieve them of the suffering they always experience during times of emergencies.
They also pleaded with the county government to deploy enough health workers, including doctors and nurses, to cater for the high number of patients in need of hospital services in the area.
One of the residents, Samuel Otieno, stressed that the absence of proper medical centres and health workers has subjected the locals to a great deal of suffering.
Otieno, a resident of Manda-Maweni village, noted that the only dispensary in the area is at Manda Airport, which is about 11 kilometres away.