The recent kidnapping of two Canadian aid workers in Kenya will not deter Central Alberta medical volunteers from travelling to the East African country a couple of times a year.
Four aid workers from the Norwegian Refugee Council, including two from Canada, were captured at gunpoint on June 29 just outside the world’s largest refugee camp located in Dadaab, northern Kenya.
The skirmish wounded two Kenyan men and killed a driver. The four were rescued on July 2.
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada has issued a travel warning.
It states that Canadians are advised to “exercise a high degree of caution” because of increasing number of terrorist acts, kidnappings and incidents of crime targeting Westerners throughout Kenya.
Islamist group Al-Shabaab based in southern Somalia has warned of planned terrorist attacks in Kenya.
Ray Comeau, a physician in Sylvan Lake, and his wife Deryl, a registered nurse, have been to Kenya about seven times to offer medical aid and provide training to medics and community health workers as part of Central Alberta-based international development organization A Better World. Their most recent trip was last month.
The Comeaus will lead a medical team to Kenya in late October.
“I think the risk is extremely small because we aren’t going to areas that are targeted,” said Comeau.
“We’re just out there in rural Africa where there isn’t any Al-Shabaab presence, so we feel very safe.”
Comeau said the medical teams generally don’t spend any time as a group in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital that’s home to about three million people.
“Right now, they are targeting the eastern, coastal part of Kenya like Lamu and Mombasa,” said Comeau.
“And there’s been a few sporadic things happen in Nairobi as well. They are mainly isolated terrorist things like people throwing a hand grenade into a bar or a restaurant or something, more than anything to disrupt Kenya’s tourist trade.”
In November 2010, Comeau and several medical volunteers travelled by boat to an island north of Lamu.
There was some risk involved because the island was close to Somalia, a lawless country where kidnappings of foreigners are frequent.
“The next year, they actually shot a British tourist (dead) and stole his wife and took her to Somalia, from that same island,” said Comeau.
Comeau said it’s unlikely the group will head to Lamu this fall after a similar trip to the region was cancelled in 2011.
“I don’t even know if we’ll be going to Mombasa, which we did do last October,” said Comeau.
Medical professionals and university medical students sign up because they know their help is so greatly needed in a land where the poor will walk great distances to get medical treatment.
“You realize how good you have it here and how difficult it is for them to get medical care, so it’s good that we can do it,” said Comeau.
Eric Rajah, co-founder of A Better World, is in Kenya with a group of students.
Reached by email, Rajah said his volunteers have travelled all over the country with no concerns or issues.
They do not travel near the bordering towns of Somalia, they avoid Nairobi’s downtown area and they keep in very close contact with locals.
“There are definitely cautions that need to be taken and a lot of common sense in choosing areas to travel,” said Rajah. “Knowledge of the area is critical.”
ltester@www.reddeeradvocate.com