MOUNTLAKE TERRACE — Just before his first birthday, 3-year-old Matho came down with a rare but serious disease.

If not treated quickly, he could have suffered long-term damage to his arteries and heart.

“That was the first time that it just hit me — I could have lost my son,” Katrina Kithene said.

It was one of many times that Katrina and Awilo “Peter” Kithene (pronounced ki-THAY-nay), of Mountlake Terrace, would remark on the amazing level of medical care families receive here in the United States compared to the rural villages of Kenya where Peter grew up — the kind of care often taken for granted.

In many parts of Kenya, a safe childbirth is no guarantee, much less a safe childhood. While more than 1.4 million children are born each year, an estimated 179,000 will die before their fifth birthday, according to UNICEF. And with more than 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS, an orphan in Kenya is ordinary.

Peter’s parents lost six of their 10 children before succumbing to unknown diseases themselves when Peter was just 12 years old. They wanted to go to a hospital, but there was none to go to.

Today, the Kithenes are on a mission to make that the exception, not the rule, of rural Kenyan life.

“Death is a destiny. We all have to go there,” Peter Kithene said. “But I think — I know — that a lot of the suffering people go through — many babies who die, for example — is because of very treatable sickness.

“Preventable causes of death shouldn’t take peoples’ lives. And even in death, people should die with dignity. You can’t die wishing there was a hospital you could go to.”

That deeply held belief led Peter, in 2005, to his hometown of Muhuru Bay to open his first rural clinic in Kenya. On that same trip, he and Katrina married. He was just 23 years old.

Today, under the nonprofit organization Mama Maria Kenya, two clinics are in operation, although now the original is perhaps better described as a hospital.

Plans are in place to open a third clinic next year. These clinics have served about 20,000 people this year alone, offering basic ambulatory and short-term inpatient care, perinatal and maternal care, immunizations, pediatric care and emergency transport. They meet common scourges, such as malaria, typhoid and pneumonia.

Poster child

Living in relative luxury, it can be hard for Americans to fully grasp the breadth of need in countries like Kenya.

“The sufferings are all statistics. We lose the faces,” Peter Kithene said.

And in that respect, Peter Kithene is the face that drives Mama Maria’s successes.

In a culture where many orphans are forced to leave school to work and support their siblings, Peter instead moved in with his grandmother in another village to focus on his education. An American couple volunteering in a nearby clinic “discovered” him and helped ensure he finished elementary school. He would earn money to buy paraffin in order to make candles and study at night. Soon, he earned a scholarship to Kenya’s premier high school in Nairobi, a nine-hour ride from his grandmother’s home.

Throughout, he was focused on others, volunteering with medical relief missions, giving educational presentations — even opening a small village grocery at age 18 that was known for helping widows and orphans.

By the time he arrived in Seattle at age 19, he was “the poster child” those in nongovernmental relief work were hoping for — a Kenyan who showed overflowing promise to help heal his country, said Katrina Kithene, who met Peter while working at one of those organizations.

“I’ve never met a more impressive human being,” she said.

Others seem to agree. In 2007, he was named a Global Hero by CNN and feted for his medical work.

Peter Kithene said he’s always been driven to help other people. As for his compassionate ambition, he shrugs his shoulders.

“If I was spiritual, I would say God. But I’m not. So I think — to get a story like mine, from a family that is one of the poorest in Kenya … there has to have been a force that has been put in me,” he said. “I’ve seen more frustrations than goodness. I don’t think you can handle that if you’re not prepared from the beginning. But I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.”

Making sacrifices

But if the Kithenes are passionate about their work, that work also takes its toll. Personal time is at a premium.

The many hours the nonprofit has taken led Peter to quit his master’s degree program in health administration at the University of Washington, where he had earned his bachelor’s degree.

While Peter considers the Seattle area his home, where his wife and son are, he spends considerable time in Kenya overseeing work at the clinics and scouting for future sites. This past year, he estimates he was in Kenya half the time, the longest stretch lasting three months.

At one point, Katrina Kithene recalled the couple’s son putting to words what each of them was thinking: “I’m happy when Daddy’s home.”

“Every single step of it has been a family effort,” she said. “It’s really become my child as much as my own son.”

Now the family might be at a crossroads. The Kithenes are examining if Katrina should continue her paying, if not quite fulfilling, job at an airline to keep the family’s lifestyle here — or move the whole family to Kenya, where their primary work is ongoing.

The answers aren’t easy. “Mama Maria is thriving, but it’s a young, small organization,” she said.

What’s next

For now, the Kithenes are focused on what’s next for Mama Maria.

A recent auction raised $76,000 for the work of the nonprofit. That’s less than last year’s $100,000 but better than expected in the current economy.

The money will, in part, help pay for an ambulance to serve the second clinic, in southwestern Kenya. At its flagship clinic in Muhuru Bay, vehicle and boat ambulances ferry people from remote villages to receive care, including from three islands.

There also are plans for the third clinic. The ultimate goal is to have a clinic in each of the country’s eight provinces with each clinic becoming self-sustaining models for others to follow.

Peter Kithene feels his son is lucky to be born in America, and he wants nothing but for the boy to be happy in life. He knows, not even 30 years old, that he’s setting out big shoes to fill — and he doesn’t want Matho to feel forced into anything as weighty.

But he also hopes to teach his son to appreciate what they have.

“I do want to let him know there are people on the other side of the world who aren’t lucky like him,” Peter said, and if he has the opportunity to make his own kind of difference, he should.