Karen Atekem

Meet Karen Atekem, a 30 year old healthcare worker from Cameroon working with the nomadic Massangam people to help them eliminate the tropical disease onchocerciasis, also known as ‘river blindness’.

Growing up, Karen heard stories about the Massangam nomads and after years of working with them, came to deeply respect their culture and travel patterns. Nomadic tribes are a challenge for many healthcare workers in Africa as they often miss the routine community health interventions and as a result, curable infections like onchocerciasis lead to irreversible blindness.

Karen has taken a different approach. She schedules her health-checks around the Massangam’s migration patterns rather than the other way around. Three times a year she uses satellite imagery to locate the tribe and travels over ten hours by car, motorbike and on foot through remote, unmapped regions of the country to treat them. Together with her team, Karen spends one month every year with the tribe, testing and treating individuals with river blindness and training members of the community to become liaisons between the researchers and their communities, an essential step in building trust.As testament to this, a few months ago when Karen didn’t show up as expected, members in the community sent their 19 year old liaison on a long hike to access a phone and call her. Karen informed him about the COVID pandemic and shared vital information about how his community could take precautions. “These people love their health and are willing to do whatever it takes to protect it,” she says. “Providing equitable medical care means everyone has a right to treatment, not just those who are settled — nomads, too.” Global Citizen