Why still care about health care? The old sign-board needs a coat of paint. When we left 21 years ago it invitingly read 'Lokori Hospital'. A few years later someone had repainted it 'Lokori Health Centre'. Now the Turkana sun has reduced it to virtual illegibility - a mute testimony to decline. The chiefs and tribal elders spoke much more forcefully when we visited for a couple of months in 1994. "Don't you realise that we have no doctor or hospital for 40,000 people in this location?" One chief begged us to stay - or at least send someone else - and sat down in tears. Our reply that one of their own young men planned to train at Kijabe Hospital as a Community Enrolled Health Worker provoked a ' too little, too late' response. Kijabe's programme has equipped another Turkana Health Centre at Lokichogio with workers, so that nurse Renate Horning now leaves all the clinical and preventive work to them while she concentrates on finances.Even so she wonders why no mission doctors can live in Turkana and occasionally visit her centre. Australian missionary, Patsy Venz also prays for a doctor in Turkana. She works as a midwife in a Health Centre built by our missionaries at Kalokol. Staff shortages forced the church to request the government to take it over. In the District centre, Lodwar, a government hospital delivers all the medical care - such as it is. Even here an AIM missionary nurse, Essie Herrod, saved many lives before leaving the area last year. When the senior Turkana pastor languished in hospital, Essie visited him daily, convinced that he needed surgery, but no surgeon worked there. Seeing a stranger wandering around the wards carrying a stethoscope she discovered he was an ear specialist visiting briefly from Nairobi. "Please look at my friend," she pleaded and the doctor examined the pastor. "Appendicitis with peritonitis," he concluded, "and there is no one here capable of handling him". Essie called her husband, Wayne, to bring his truck and together they carried their friend 150 miles to the Sudan border where a Red Cross surgeon, serving Sudanese in a large refugee hospital, operated successfully. But what of the many who lack any caring nurse or skilled doctor? ( Rev.Timothy Alford, U.K.Director of AIM concludes the editorial ' Are missionaries needed ?', saying; " There is however a surfeit of Western Christians who ought to be getting on with the job instead of asking theoretical questions about it." Ed. )