From Wedding Films to Hospital Bills
I don’t know about other kids, but as a child, I was always looking for ways to make money.
Some of my pursuits involved selling decorated scraps of wood from our neighbor’s carpentry shop, drawing and selling Pokemon pictures to the neighborhood kids (25 cents for black and white, 50 cents if colored), and even selling pinecones to my neighbors via wagon (which I probably collected from their own yard). I started babysitting at age 12 and had my own bank account with my savings by 14.
Clearly entrepreneurship was in my blood from a young age.
So it was no surprise when I started my own wedding filmmaking business. I loved learning not just the art of filming, editing and storytelling, but I also just really loved figuring out how to find and book clients, and how to grow my profit margin. [I’m a solid enneagram three if you couldn’t tell ;) ]
Despite cross-country moves, becoming a mom, and navigating Covid, I was really proud of what I’d created and how far I’d come in the ten years I invested into my business.
I was curious to see if I missed it or not when I closed up shop and we moved to Kenya.
Let me be clear: I’m no expert, and you won’t find an MBA on my resume. But economics has always fascinated me.
Before we came to Kenya, I had this idea that somehow our small mission hospital, and most non-profits, could figure out a way to be sustainable if they only had the right ideas.
It’s become very clear to me that caring for the poor is not a sustainable, nor profitable, endeavor.
I’ve come to realize that even in the US, it’s the government who ultimately pays for the programs, hospitals, and bills of the poor. But Kenya’s economy is much more lean. [Compared to the States, a “fat” economy where there is plenty of excess]. Many of the government programs and safety nets we’d expect to care for the poor just simply don’t exist here.
So how does that translate into the healthcare scene?
The truth is, many people just don’t access the healthcare they need because they know they can’t afford it. Kenya does have medical insurance (about $2.50/month for an entire family) but many families struggle to come up with even that amount to cover an unexpected illness. When food is needed today, it’s hard to put money towards a hypothetical need in the future that may or may never come.
However, when tragedy strikes and you’ve got no insurance - you’re left with an even bigger problem: how do you pay for the care you desperately need?
Many resort to herbal medicines, which often lead to larger health complications. Some go to government hospitals but are turned away because they can’t pay for treatment upfront. And some come to Kapsowar, knowing we will help, and they can deal with the cost of the huge bill later.
When they recover and are discharged, many people hold fundraisers among their extended family and within their community to help raise the amount of the bill, perhaps similar to our GoFundMe campaigns.
Often the hospital will reduce the total amount of the bill required for them. However, this places a large strain on the hospital’s sustainability, as the prices are already very low. It’s not uncommon that a person will just wait at the hospital for months, unable to pay, until finally the hospital just writes the bill off and sends them home.
All of us here in Kapsowar want to care for anyone who walks through our doors - regardless of whether they can pay or not.
But we still have to find a way to keep the lights on.
Over the past year, I’ve joined forces with our social work team, who are some of my favorite people at the hospital. One of their main jobs is to assess all our cash payers to get an idea of who is really the poorest of the poor, and thus who is unlikely to have the resources to pay their bill.
As an outsider here, I could never do this. It takes so much context to know who is actually poor and who is telling stories. It’s always been interesting to me to hear how the social workers can read between the lines. Sometimes they notice the patient’s parent hasn’t changed their clothes in weeks. Sometimes they notice a mom isn’t able to buy diapers for her newborn. Or they notice some soda by the bedside - a sign of disposable income. Often they call the chief from their village to get the full background scoop on a patient, or personally visit the village themselves. [If they ever leave social work, they could probably enter the private investigation scene, ha].
Based of their assessments, we have a clue as to who here is truly in need.
My role is in helping communicate the stories of these patients to our donors, so that their bills can be covered.
Now, you would hope we had some big foundation with thousands of dollars we could pull from. But currently, our only ongoing donor partner is two German medical students, who came to Kapsowar several years ago and decided upon returning home to fundraise to help cover bills for pediatric patients. [While in medical school. They are amazing.]
I type up the stories in a succinct and understandable way, and email them off to Germany. If the small non-profit has the funds to cover the bill, they send it electronically to the hospital, and the patient goes home.
I’ll also add that a church in the US fundraised a significant one-time donation last Christmas to help support patients like these as well. We’re hoping the fund can last us a year if we set a modest cap on what we can use each month for select patients.
What’s crazy is that many bills (for medicine and pediatrics, not surgery) are only about $200-$800, depending on the procedures done and the length of stay. A single day (maybe even a single hour) in a US hospital would be much more than that.
Nevertheless, when you only make $2.50 a day, an $800 bill is just about your entire salary for the year.
Before we came to Kapsowar, if you wanted to donate to the hospital, there was really no organized way to give online to the needs at the hospital. One of my big projects here has been setting up a tax-deductible method for people to give to needs at the hospital with the simple click using their credit card.
And while one-time fundraising drives at churches are super helpful for us, our greatest need is a monthly, recurring source of donations that would help us sustainably and consistently have a source of funds for these patients.
Sounds like we need some money as a hospital.
I suppose attempting to find creative ways to bring in money has always been a hobby of mine.
I can’t say I’ve been very successful at it yet, ha! I have so much to still learn. But I’ve begun to lay the groundwork for getting “Friends of Kapsowar”, essentially our non-profit arm of the hospital, organized and up and running.
With our fledgling fund, we’ve been collecting the stories of the patients and the incredible impact it’s making as we hope to expand the program. You can read one of these stories here. Japhet is a patient who Jack cared for during the strike and who came in very sick.
Storytelling. Creatively earning money. Seems like those years of running my own business were not actually a life detour but preparation for something bigger and better than my own bank account.
I remember the dopamine rush I’d get when I’d receive the email, “We’d love to book you for our wedding day!” But now - I get even more excited when I see the email come through - “A new donation has been made”.
It turns out, seeing a patient or child go home with a huge weight off their chest, and knowing you had a role to play in that is way better than booking a high-end wedding.
Turns out Jesus knew what he was doing when he said, “If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.”
If you’d like to contribute to this fund, you can do so directly here on our hospital website. But please know, if you donate to us through Serge, you are already helping us with this need! Very often we will pay (from our Serge fund) for a patient’s CT or MRI scan, needed medication, or even cover a hospital bill when we know a patient can’t afford it.