How My Medical Mission Trip to Kenya Transformed My Vision For Rooted Health

Some trips are vacations. Some are transformations.  My recent experience was both.  

I recently returned from a Medical Mission trip to a small village in the Rift Valley outside of Nairobi, Kenya - a familiar place with familiar faces as my family and I had been there in the fall of 2023 as well.  Little had changed.  I approached this trip with the knowledge that my American medicines and American training would be of questionable long term value as both medicine and my time there were limited.  No fancy diagnostics, no EMR.  There were things I could offer - hands on healing, eye contact, and listening.  Listening - even with a language barrier - became the most powerful diagnostic tool.  Human connection became the treatment plan. 

It was raw, real, and radically grounding.  It was the very reason I became a physician.  I would experience a community coming together to save the life of a man brought to me.  I would experience my family of 4 kids plus 2 adoring significant others and my husband all reaching beyond expectations to connect with an amazing village of people from an entirely different culture - each culture embracing the differences of the other.   It was in the long days of not eating, no running water, no electricity, sheets for exam room dividers, long bus rides to and from the village, creativity in toilet design (that’s another blog) that I reconnected with me and deepened my vision for Rooted Health.  

But the second half of the trip — the Safari — was its own kind of medicine.   Waking up with the sun, watching herds of elephants right outside of our tent, hearing the low rumble of lions calling to each other in the darkness, feeling the hush of the African savannah …it was nature in it’s purest form.  It was healing in the absence of technology and the presence of human interaction.  It was the quaintness of an intimate gathering of people from around the world undoubtedly in search of the same.  It was the beauty of the call of the wild.  And it was also silence …the kind that speaks loud and clear.  We heal when we return to what’s natural. 

That’s what Rooted Health is all about —not just hormones and lab work, but rhythm, rest, and reconnection.  The kind I witnessed in a clinic without walls.  The kind I felt under the stars in a quaint tent.  The kind most of us are missing.  

This trip replanted and redefined my vision for Rooted Health.  It’s not just a practice —it’s a movement.  A return to presence.  A return to the meaning of medicine.  A space for women to stop surviving and start thriving —deeply, naturally, and unapologetically.  

Wherever I go, I carry this mission with me.  Healing is not something we do.  It’s who we become.