Missouri college student launches Rwandan health clinic project
He never dreamed, though, that someday he'd be sitting in that very hotel — Hotel des Milles Collines — in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. Nor did he imagine he would pull together a group of college friends and travel with them to Rwanda to build a clinic for poor children and women.
He also never thought he would lead an effort to link the 50,000 citizens of Kibungo, Rwanda, with residents of Fulton and Callaway counties in Missouri, where Oldebeken attends Westminster College.
But last month, after winning a $10,000 Davis Foundation Project for Peace grant, that is exactly what the 21-year-old former Oak Park High School student did.
Oldebeken, who grew up in Gladstone, is a sophomore majoring in biochemistry and wants to be a doctor. And someday, he hopes to volunteer in the Kibungo clinic he and his friends want to see built.
"We really haven't helped a lot of people just yet, but that is the intention," Oldebeken said.
For now, he's focusing his efforts on one village in Rwanda.
The health care needs in the town of Kibungo include medicine and transportation to clinics.
"There are very few doctors and nurses," Oldebeken said. "During the genocide, they all fled."
Residents struggle with, and sometimes die from, illnesses that are easily taken care of in wealthier countries.
"Imagine a mother being told, 'I'm sorry, but your son just died of diarrhea-borne germs,' " Oldebeken said.
He and friends Gina Campagna, of Kansas City; Clayton Jordon, of Jefferson City; and Samantha Richman, of Centralia, spent 18 days in Rwanda. They prayed with citizens and met with medical and government officials, as well as business owners.
As the students went from community to community in Kibungo to tout their clinic plan, swarms of children followed.
Some of the same children who, Oldebeken said, walk with their mothers several hours and many miles from their rural homes, then wait as long as six hours to get basic pharmaceuticals.
That's whom he wants to build the clinic for. He wants the clinic to come with a van filled with medical supplies that would travel to people living so far into the countryside that many women end up giving birth on the side of the road while trying to get to a doctor.
"Believe it or not, it is only going to take about $50,000 to build a clinic and also establish a mobile clinic," said Bob Woodson, incoming president of the Fulton Rotary Club. Oldebeken and his team persuaded the organization to make raising money for the clinic a project for the year.
"You create peace by being a friend to the rest of the world," Woodson said. "I think this is a wonderful project. I think many people are interested."
Oldebeken's father, Jim Oldebeken, said when he first heard what his son was planning, he was surprised that he would take time away from studying to volunteer at this level.
But he's proud of his son and said that whatever his son puts his mind to, he usually makes happen.
"He is ambitious and driven," he said. "He can lock into a goal and then pursue it."
To launch their clinic idea, Oldebeken and his team, with help from Fight for the Children, a nonprofit organization that provides medical care to children in the developing world, persuaded officials in Fulton and in Kibungo to work together.
"This is about getting financial support for the clinic and for the people in Kibungo," Oldebeken said.
His interest in reaching out to poor nations was inspired through a presentation by a campus administrator, Bob Hansen. Hansen, director of counseling and health services at Westminster, traveled to Africa while working with Fight for the Children last fall.
What moved Oldebeken into action was a story Hansen told about a very poor Ugandan boy who did not recognize his own reflection because he'd never seen it before.
Right away, Oldebeken began looking for opportunities to do volunteer work in underdeveloped nations. In March, he traveled on a church mission to Guatemala. When he returned, he learned that he'd won the peace grant he'd applied for months earlier. He used the money to plan the clinic and set the Fulton-Kibungo partnership in motion.
"Fourteen years ago, the west neglected Rwanda, and over 800,000 people died in the genocide," Oldebeken said.
"We are going to try and keep that from ever happening again. But this time, the foes are different. The foes are primitive diseases, the spread of HIV and a lack of access to health care, not men with machetes."
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