After an Elephant Attack, a Maasai Boy Needed Local Care. Years Later, He Helps Deliver it.

The elephant was close enough to kill him. About as tall as a basketball rim and weighing many tons, it swept the boy down and was attacking him with its feet, rustling up a wall of dust.

Andrew Kiranto, now 32, remembers that day vividly. He had been walking with friends close to his home on Maasai land, near Kenya's Amboseli National Park. The dust the elephant kicked up kept it from seeing him clearly, he said, causing it to miss the blow that might have ended his life.

Still, Kiranto was badly injured, with lacerations and contusions, scars he carries today, in addition to mental trauma.

"My mates took me to a far facility," he said. "I could not sleep. I just thought this massive animal would kill me."

It took a week for him to reach the nearest clinic. In the remote Maasai communities where Kiranto grew up, the nearest health facility was 80 kilometers away, over rough roads, especially during rainy season.

Instead of making the arduous journey, people who needed care were often treated with herbs and other traditional medicines. Women delivered babies at home. When someone needed surgery or emergency care, transport could mean a donkey and days on the road.

Kiranto said the elephant attack was one of the moments that helped push him toward a life in health care based near his home. If care had been closer when he was hurt, he thought, the suffering would not have lasted for so long.

Today, there is the Health Wagon, a mobile clinic supported by Africa Schools of Kenya, or ASK, that serves children and adults in Esiteti and neighboring Embarinkoi, Ilmarba, Oldule and Olmoti.

The clinic provides immunizations, basic medicines, HIV and malaria testing, antenatal care, family planning and minor trauma treatment. In 2025, the Health Wagon, where Kiranto now works as a nurse, cared for almost 2,100 patients, including 148 visits for family planning, 142 for antenatal care, and 574 childhood immunizations.

ASK's origin story is set about 30 years ago with a safari in Amboseli National Park, near where Kiranto was nearly killed.

Teri Gabrielsen, an education and marketing professional from California, was visiting the area and met a Maasai elder connected to the village, one of the few people there who had gone through formal education, through about eighth grade. He asked her to help bring education to children in the community. Gabrielsen had young children at the time, but she promised she would come back.

Ten years later, she did.

"James Ole Kamete asked me to bring education to the village," said Gabrielsen, who serves as ASK's executive director. "There was no education and no healthcare back then."

In 2009, ASK built Esiteti Mixed Day and Boarding Primary & Junior Secondary School, which teaches about 1,000 students from kindergarten through ninth grade, in addition to hosting a nursery school.

For Dr. Elizabeth Toro, an OB-GYN and ASK's volunteer director of health, the case for ongoing, sustainable health care access was clear long before the Wagon arrived. Visiting doctors and nurses had held temporary clinics in classrooms, covering windows for privacy while goats walked nearby.

But the model lacked continuity, as outsiders arrived, treated people and left.

The Health Wagon launched in February 2019, in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Edna Lenku, first lady of Kajiado County. It gave the community a local health care base, run by local people.

Kiranto was in seventh grade when he entered the school. Before that, he said, he attended a simple school where children sat outside, using rocks as chairs and trees for shade. ASK sponsored him through high school in partnership with private donors. After graduation, he enrolled in college to become a nurse.

Kiranto is part of a team whose work reflects ASK's larger bet on education as the foundation for long-term community health. His grade school education was sponsored by ASK's Student Scholarship program in partnership with private donors. Upon earning his certificate in nursing, he returned home and began working at the Health Wagon.

"After graduating, I knew I would come back to help my community," he said, fulfilling a promise he had made to Gabrielsen.

Elizabeth Katamboi, who is the first woman to graduate from college in Esiteti Village, and Seuta Kisioki have worked on the Wagon since earning a diploma in community health and nutrition and a certificate in community health and development, respectively. Both Katamboi and Kisioki were given full college scholarships by ASK and private sponsors.

Katamboi and Kisioki are responsible for the Health Wagon's community outreach, helping connect families to care in places where distance, cost, and custom have long kept health services out of reach. Kiranto diagnoses and treats patients and provides health education.

Lisa Stangl also works with ASK to support the Health Wagon. A certified family nurse practitioner, she recently retired after a 40-year career as an HIV specialist. She helps supervise and support a model designed to further train and equip local practitioners.

"These nurses embody the sustainable, community-led vision that founders James Ole Kamete and Teri Gabrielsen dreamed of - children who once attended Esiteti School now provide health care for the communities that raised them," Toro said.

ASK also runs an alternative rite of passage program for girls, part of a broader effort to end female genital mutilation. Toro said the pitch to leaders was practical: Let girls finish school first. Education gave many of them the confidence to refuse the practice later.

According to ASK, maternal and fetal deaths have fallen drastically in the communities the Wagon serves, a result Kiranto attributed to safer birthing practices and improved antenatal care. Children are receiving immunizations. Families are receiving malaria testing, family planning, and referrals when a case needs hospital-level care.

Kiranto is often the person making the referrals. Once hurt, threatened, and dozens of miles away from care, today he is helping shorten the time and distance separating people in his community from the medical care they need.

Direct Relief awarded Africa Schools of Kenya a $20,000 grant to sustain critical healthcare services at their mobile Health Wagon over the next two years.