Raising Awareness for Maternal Child Health Clinics: Cycling Around Mt. Kenya

How one HopeCore staff is joining a team of cyclists to ride 300 km around Mt. Kenya to help raise funds and awareness for HopeCore’s Home Based Child Maternal Health clinics this Giving Tuesday!

December 1st, 2021 is GIVING TUESDAY. Giving Tuesday is a global giving day, following Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It is a special day dedicated to giving back during this holiday season.

This year, HopeCore is excited to share a new and unique campaign for GIVING TUESDAY. Our very own staff member, Melavin Muthamaki is hitting the road on his bike, to ride 300 km with 10 other cyclists around Mt. Kenya on November 29th and 30th.

Road Ride Raising Money for Child Maternal Health

This ride is dedicated to raising money for HopeCore’s Home-Based Child Maternal health clinics. When COVID began early in 2020, HopeCore had to strategically find a way to continue to provide much-needed services to the women and children in our communities. Our public health teams swiftly responded by initiating a Home-Based MCH program where our teams of nurses and community health volunteers go out on foot, traveling door to door to provide health check-ups to new mothers and children under 5. Most of these families otherwise would not have received any medical care in the last year. Through this program, HopeCore continues to do well-child exams, immunization check-ups, de-worming, and Vitamin A supplementation.

This year, HopeCore is doing something fun and unique for GIVING TUESDAY, to raise support for these HopeCore clinics.

Meet Melavin Muthamaki!

Read his story below:

My name is Melavin. I began riding in January 2019. I began riding as a way to unplug from the internet and movies. I discovered that I was spending a large chunk of my time during my weekends on Social Media. I did not know any cyclist at the time so I just watched YouTube videos on how to become a cyclist. The initial cost of the bike was extremely high. I immediately regretted the decision. I even thought of selling the bike. Cycling also turned out to be harder than I had anticipated. I reached out to the person who sold the bike to me and he suggested that I try cycling 100 km. That was unimaginable because I could barely ride 5kms. I, however, decided to give it a shot. I ended up cycling 86 km. When I got arrived back home, I was soo tired I could barely see. I decided to post the ride on Facebook.

Melavin Muthamaki with his bike in front of the HopeCore office in Chogoria, Kenya

Gilbert Mugambi, who had seen my post from Facebook, messaged me. He requested that we ride together the next weekend. That weekend I finally rode 100 km. We came up with the idea to start Meru Cycling Club to motivate more people to get into cycling. Meru Cycling Club currently has 53 active members. We cycle during weekends. We have always dreamt and talked about cycling around Mt. Kenya. It is the most difficult cycling route in Kenya. The route is 307 km (190 Miles) long with over 6000M (19600ft) elevation gain. That is literally more than climbing Mt. Kenya which is 5199M (17,000 ft) above sea level. The difficulty involved meant that it was very hard to find the motivation to do it. I decided to do a solo ride to raise attention for Giving Tuesday

Fundraising Campaign and shared that with my Club Members. Nine members of the Club offered to join me during the ride. Everyone in our Club is so excited that for the first time in our cycling lives, we will be riding with a purpose. A goal of raising money to treat under 5 years of age children in Chogoria.