What a Caregiver Can Ask the County For

A family caregiver usually carries the whole thing alone. The grandmother raising her grandchildren, the daughter who came home to look after a father who can no longer walk, the mother of a child with a disability: most of them have never been inside an office that could help. Not because the offices do not exist, but because nobody told them which door, what to bring, or what to say.

Lift A Life Foundation is a community based organisation registered with the County Government of Kiambu, and advocacy is one of the three activities we are registered for. In practice it is mostly this: knowing where a caregiver can go, going with them, and making sure the visit is not the end of the matter.

Where a caregiver can go

The county social services office is the general door. It is where a caregiver can ask about support for an older person, a person with a disability, or a household that is struggling to cope. Nobody needs a referral to walk in. They need to say plainly who they care for, what the difficulty is, and what they are asking.

The children's officer is the door for anything involving a child. Orphans, children being raised by relatives, children whose care arrangements are uncertain: this is the officer whose job it is to hear it. A caregiver who has taken in a sibling's children has good reason to be known to this office before anything goes wrong.

The assistant chief is the nearest door of all. This is local administration, the office that knows the households in the area and can confirm who lives where and who is caring for whom. A letter from here is often the first thing a bigger office asks for, so it is usually the first stop rather than the last.

The sub-county sits between the ward and the county. When a matter cannot be settled locally, or a caregiver has been told to go higher, this is usually what higher means. We do not describe particular desks or programmes here, because those change and we would rather a caregiver ask than trust a stale article.

What advocacy means in practice

It does not mean speaking on somebody's behalf. The person we go with knows the situation, and they are the one the officer should be listening to. Our job is to sit beside them, not in front of them.

What we add is small and specific. We know which office to try first. We can help put the story in the order an officer needs to hear it. We can ask the question the caregiver was too tired or too embarrassed to ask, and note down the answer so it does not evaporate on the walk home.

A caregiver alone can be sent away with a vague instruction to come back another day. Two people, one of them writing, tend to leave with a name, a date, or a clear reason why the answer is no. That is not pressure. It is simply being harder to forget.

What to bring

Identity documents, for everyone concerned. The caregiver's own identity card, and whatever exists for the person being cared for: a birth certificate or notification for a child, an identity card for an adult, any disability card if one has been issued. If a document is missing, that is itself something to raise, because getting it is often the first step to everything else.

A written account, one page, in plain words. Who the caregiver is, who they look after, how the situation came about, what the household lives on, and what the difficulty is. Writing it down beforehand means it gets said in full even when the room is busy and the caregiver is nervous.

Dates. When the parent died. When the person stopped being able to walk. When the caregiver last visited an office and what they were told. Officers deal in dates, and a caregiver who has them is taken more seriously than one who says some time last year.

What is realistic to expect

Rarely a solution on the first visit. More often it produces a request for a document, a referral to another office, or an instruction to return on a particular day. That is not failure. It is how these processes work, and a caregiver who expects it will not give up after one trip.

Sometimes the honest answer is that nothing is available for this situation right now. That is worth hearing clearly, because it stops the caregiver spending fare on a door that will not open. We would rather know a no than chase a maybe.

What is fair to expect is being heard, and being told the next step in a way that can be written down. If a visit ends without either, we go back.

Persistence, and why we write everything down

Most of what advocacy delivers comes from the second and third visit, not the first. Offices are busy, staff change, files move. The caregiver who returns with the letter that was asked for, on the day that was named, is the one whose matter moves.

That is why we write down every referral: the office, the date, the name if one was given, what was asked for and what was promised. A notebook is enough. When a caregiver is told to come back in a month, somebody else remembers, and when a matter stalls, we can say exactly where.

We are small, and we do not publish impact numbers yet, because we would rather the numbers be true than early. What we can say is that walking into the right office with the right papers and somebody beside you is a different experience from walking in alone. If you are caring for somebody and do not know where to start, tell us. If you have the patience to sit in a waiting room with a stranger and take notes, we need you.