Clinically sound: Saratoga Springs nonprofit's latest venture in healthcare

The Giving Circle's 20th year brings a new way to help in Uganda

Volunteers with Saratoga’s Giving Circle, a nonprofit organization started in 2005 in the wake of hurricanes Rita and Katrina, have just returned from an annual trip to Uganda where they worked for the first time in a clinic the organization built for the villagers in Mutai, a small community just north of Lake Victoria.

Views of the new Mark and Kelly Bertrand Clinic in Mutai, Uganda. The Giving Circle of Saratoga funded the project. (Photos provided.)

Although work and planning started in 2019, the clinic building was only finished last year because of delays related to the COVD pandemic, and it only received its final approval to open as a medical facility from the Ugandan government in February. So this trip marked the volunteers’ first time actually working in the Mark and Kelly Bertrand clinic.

The midwifery practice that the Giving Circle helped organize years ago has now moved into the new clinic, as did a staff of nurses, technicians, security guards and a doctor.

On a normal day, villagers pay small sums of money for health care.

For two days earlier in July, the 23 volunteers — including eight doctors and one physician assistant from Saratoga and elsewhere — opened the clinic to everyone they could see for free, 381 people in all. Some they saw again a few days later for follow-up visits.

“It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done,” Christine Caffrey told the Dispatch. Caffrey is a speech pathologist and was on her first trip with the Giving Circle.

“All hands on deck”

Over those two days, the volunteers worked alongside