MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Last August 16-year-old Purity Wamboi was home during her school break in Nairobi, Kenya, helping with chores, says her mom, Rachael Wanjiru.
RACHAEL WANJIRU: (Through interpreter) She wasn't feeling too well. She used to cough severely. She had chest pains. Sometimes I could hear her shivering. And therefore, I asked her to take a break.
KELLY: But things kept getting worse. As Ari Daniel reports, for three weeks, Purity's mother raced to figure out what was wrong amidst a lapse in USAID funding in the country.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Rachael Wanjiru says that her daughter tried to keep the discomfort to herself.
WANJIRU: (Through interpreter) She understood that I didn't have money, and she didn't want to stress me out.
DANIEL: Wanjiru got her some painkillers, which helped. But after Purity returned to school, the pain came back stronger. Wanjiru brought her into a local clinic for a checkup. It was pneumonia, the medical staff told her, but she didn't respond to the treatment. A couple of weeks passed. Tabitha Mugweru works as a community health promoter and is a close family friend.
TABITHA MUGWERU: I met them on the road. They were coming from a private hospital. Then I saw Purity was very weak. Purity was not doing well at all.
DANIEL: Mugweru referred Purity to a governmental health center, which sent her for a chest X-ray. This wasn't pneumonia. It was tuberculosis.
MUGWERU: The TB was diagnosed very, very late.
DANIEL: She got new medications, but the bacterial infection had already consumed a portion of Purity's lungs. Mugweru says there had been a more extensive team of community health promoters who used to fan out into Kenya visiting families in their homes, where they may have caught something like Purity's TB sooner. But these workers were paid with funds that came from USAID. When the Trump administration shuttered the agency, Mugweru says that money dried up.
MUGWERU: Most of them stopped working when USAID withdrew their support. They could have reached Purity earlier during home visit.
DANIEL: The TB treatment came too late for Purity, who, at that point, didn't even want to take all the pills. Her condition deteriorated rapidly. Then came the day when she asked to sit in the sunshine and have a cup of porridge. Mugweru recalls that after Purity went back inside, things got bad.
MUGWERU: She started shaking - shaking, shaking, shaking. And then her eyes were wide open, and they turned white.
DANIEL: They called an Uber to take her to the hospital.
MUGWERU: Purity died when I was holding her. We didn't think that Purity was going to die, no. We thought everything was going to be good, then all of a sudden, boom, Purity is no more.
DANIEL: Mugweru says that she wished those health promoters continued getting paid so they could have kept on doing their work. Maybe, she says, Purity would still be alive. NPR reached out to state department officials. They sent a statement that didn't address the specifics of Purity's story but pointed to the Trump administration's signing of the first bilateral health memorandum of understanding with Kenya, amounting to a total of $2.5 billion over five years with funding from both countries that supports, in part, tuberculosis programs. The State Department wrote, quote, "this co-investment model ensures greater country ownership and accountability." But the new U.S. contribution is less than previous USAID funding levels for Kenya. For Rachael Wanjiru, she says her life has a different shape since her daughter's passing.
WANJIRU: (Through interpreter) Sometimes, I feel like I could just take my two sons and go with them far, far away to a place where I don't have to come back from. Since Purity's death, I felt like a part of me has been taken away.
DANIEL: It's a reality, she says, that's put a dent of pain in her heart. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADRIAN'S "9 AM IN CALABASAS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
