The doors of mercy are swinging wide open in western Kenya at Rehema Hospice and Clinic. Rehema is a place of refuge for those suffering in body and soul from chronic and life-threatening illness. Located in a rural setting near Ringa Town in Homa Bay County, Rehema’s mission is to provide clinical services, hospice and palliative care to the local community and the region. It is the only dedicated hospice in a four county area, home to over 5 million people. Rehema is being built, literally brick by brick as funding allows.

Rehema was founded in January 2022 with the purchase of land and drilling for water on the property. In October 2023, she opened her doors of mercy for the first time, providing outpatient services in the clinic as well as home-based care. A few months later in March 2024, Rehema welcomed her first inpatient hospice and palliative care guests. Today, Rehema serves men, women, and children, relieving acute, chronic, and life-threatening diseases. She now has 48 beds, and has recently finished a children’s ward and surgery center. This two-story project was started in April of 2025, and now has 12 pediatric beds and a state-of-the-art surgical suite for emergency C-sections from child birth complications.

Rehema works closely with the local Ministry of Health and in the community with the help of community health promoters (CHPs). These front-line health care workers provide basic health care in their villages. CHPs are, at many times, the first contact for people needing more specialized healthcare, often reaching out to Rehema for follow up for their neighbor clients.  

Rehema’s staff are trained in clinical, hospice and palliative care providing the best possible compassionate care to those who walk through her doors. Recently, our nurses have begun regularly treating patients in their homes, monitoring health, providing medications and wound care, and training families and caregivers on how best to care for their loved ones.

Caring for body and soul also means providing spiritual care.  Inpatients and home care patients are cared for by staff member Deaconess Elizabeth, and a local chaplain, Pastor Isaac, who regularly do devotions with patients, pray with them and listen to their needs.  These two provide spiritual and social counsel to patients and work as their advocates with the medical staff, the patient’s own home pastoral caregivers, and with patient family members. Deaconess Elizabeth is like a family member to our inpatients, because patients in the facility are often isolated from their own families and communities due to the long distances friends and family have to travel to get to Rehema.  

Deaconess Elizabeth also accompanies the medical staff on home visits and is a great advocate for Rehema in her community. Her mission is to bring the comfort of Christ through the Word of God to hurting hearts and worried minds, relieving loneliness, and bringing dignity and regard.  

Rehema’s goal is to relieve suffering through palliative care and end-of-life care, called hospice care, bringing patients comfort, dignity and hope.  Rehema in the national language, Swahili, means Mercy, and its goal is to be the face of Christ’s mercy for His hurting brothers and sisters in rural western Kenya.