UK grad runs hospital for orphans in Africa

Amy Hehre was photographed with some of the babies at OVI Children’s Hospital in Migori, Kenya, which she co-founded with her husband, Robert.

For the past two years, Amy Hehre has been living her dream: she runs a five-story nonprofit hospital for orphaned and abandoned children in Africa.

Now, the 27-year-old Somerset native wants to take her organization global, and as a first step, she met last month with the Dalai Lama.

Hehre, who looks as though she just stepped out of the pages of a magazine, is also a top sales representative for a skincare brand, Rodan + Fields.

And she and her husband are the adoptive parents to a young Kenyan girl.

Yes, she’s got a lot going on.

But, Hehre said, the children are the reason for it all.

“We’re so much more than just saving their lives. We really want to empower them and enable them,” she said. “We do think they’re going to be world leaders. That’s our mission, to find the world’s most vulnerable children and make them leaders of change.”

“We are social entrepreneurs, and we absolutely love the idea of doing something bigger than ourselves and not for ourselves,” she said.

Hehre said she aims to bring the humanitarian and the entrepreneurial worlds together “so that I’m not just rocking one baby, but I’m enabling millions of babies … (to) be rescued.”

Hehre doesn’t want to stop with just one or two hospitals. Her goal is to open hundreds of them around the world.

Hehre graduated as a physician’s assistant from the University of Kentucky in 2017. She and her husband, Robert Hehre, who is also a PA, opened OVI Children’s Hospital in Migori, Kenya, the same year.

The hospital is currently providing care to about 80 sick and disabled children, all of whom have been orphaned or abandoned.

“We go and find these children in, you know, places that you would never even imagine. We’ve picked up children who were 7 years old that looked like they were 4 months old,” she said.

The five-story OVI Children’s Hospital in Migori, Kenya, provides care for orphans and abandoned children. The hospital currently has about 80 patients, said co-founder Amy Hehre. PHOTO SUBMITTED

While some of the children will be at OVI for only a short time, others are critically disabled and have nowhere else to go. Hehre said they can be cared for at the hospital even into adulthood.

The Hehres live at the hospital with their daughter, Lily, who they adopted from the community where they live. Hehre said Lily’s mother died suddenly when the child was a month old. “We met each other and fell in love just a few months after,” she said.

While Lily is their only child, “we raise all these children like our own,” she said.

Amy Hehre was photographed with some of the babies at OVI Children’s Hospital in Migori, Kenya, which she co-founded with her husband, Robert. PHOTO SUBMITTED

But they are not doing it alone.

“It takes a LOT of us,” Hehre said.

Nearly 60 Kenyan employees - including nurses, physical therapists and caregivers, also known as “mamas” - work there.

“The mamas here at the hospital are actually widowed mothers,” Hehre said. “We do that on purpose because these women, number one, they can be very financially vulnerable. So a lot of times they’ve been separated from their own children. Their own children have been put in orphanages because of poverty.”

With jobs and a steady income, Hehre said the women possibly can reunite with their children.

Because of what they and their children have been through, the women who work as mamas are also uniquely equipped to care for the hospital’s children who have experienced traumatic losses, Hehre said.

“The goal was always to bring on locals to take care of the children,” she said. “We do love them, but it’s not just us. It’s hugely the Kenyans.”

Hehre said she and her husband work with four other Kenyan “clinical officers” the equivalent of a physician’s assistant in Kenya, as well as a “medical officer” who is the equivalent of a doctor. The hospital hires or consults with specialists as needed, she said.

So far, she said the hospital has helped nearly 2,000 children as inpatients and through field outreach.

Hehre said much of her time is spent in an administrative role, planning, networking and fundraising for her nonprofit, named Ovi & Violet International in memory of her late nephew, Ovidio, who died in 2015 at age 3.

“I work pretty much like a hospital CEO would,” she said. “I came here thinking that I would spend my whole day rocking babies and practicing medicine.”

And while she does spend some time on those things, Hehre said, “largely I teach the locals how to do it, so it continues on even beyond my lifetime.”

She said she often works through the night because she’s connecting with people in time zones on the other side of the world.

Hehre grew up in Somerset, enjoyed competing in pageants as a teen and attended Western Kentucky University.

Her life changed, though, when she drew a question out of a hat while attending a conference in college. It said, “If you could live any life, what would it be and why?”

“I always joked that I was a pageant girl and I just had my little answer of, ‘Oh, well I’d love to travel the world and find the most vulnerable children and help them access the health care they need,” she said.

“And someone just asked me, ‘Well if that’s the life you want to be living, then why aren’t you living it?’”

“I was so convicted by that,” she said. “I literally dropped my major, everything I was doing, and I picked up medicine.”

She said she Googled “medical opportunities in Africa” and got on a plane by herself at 20 years old to make her first visit to Kenya, the country that was to become her home.

“I was never the same,” she said. “I just saw the faces of the children, the devastation, the lack of access to health care. And I just thought you know if children with families are struggling this much, what about children who have nothing at all. These orphans, these abandoned children. Who’s taking care of them?”

While studying at WKU, she said she researched the need and drew up business plans.

She attended UK’s physician assistant school at the Morehead campus, and seven years after meeting Robert Hehre at summer camp, she married him.

Amy Hehre, a Somerset native and physicians assistant, held a tiny patient. She and her husband founded OVI Children’s Hospital in Migori, Kenya.

Her mother, Elizabeth Correll, told the Commonwealth Journal that churches and organizations in the Somerset area raised the $300,000 that allowed the Hehres to buy the hospital building.

While expenses vary depending on the medical needs of the children, Hehre said it takes about $400,000 a year to keep the hospital running.

“My husband and I had chosen not to take any income from the hospital whatsoever,” she said. “I could’ve taken a salary, but the conviction in my heart was I didn’t want to do that.”

But she also was in debt as a result of student loans and credit cards.

Hehre said she hoped she would not always have to go on “desperation,” begging donors for funds again and again to keep children from dying.

So a year ago, she became a consultant for Rodan + Fields skincare products and quickly became so successful that she was able to become a donor herself.

Within the first month, she had reached the top 2 percent of sales in the multi-level marketing company.

“It’s been a crazy blessing,” she said. “I was like, wow, I could fund my hospital like three times over in one month with what some of these women are making in their monthly salaries, and I was inspired by that.”

“Getting into the entrepreneurial world … has been so empowering,” she said. “It’s something I can do anywhere in the world.”

Hehre frequently posts about the business on her social media pages.

While attending a global women’s summit in Dubai in November, Hehre said she ran into someone she was already acquainted with who was “connected with the Dalai Lama.” That person had a meeting planned with him in just two days and invited Hehre to go along.

Hehre found herself in India.

Amy Hehre, middle row, in white, a Kentucky native and graduate of UK and WKU, runs a hospital for orphans and abandoned children with severe medical conditions in Kenya. She recently met with the Dalai Lama.

She “had always dreamed of putting a hospital in India,” she said. “Who better to have in your corner than the Dalai Lama when you’re wanting to do something that big.”

She said the 84-year-old spiritual leader talked with her group about serving vulnerable children, and while in India, she found a community that might be a good location for a new hospital. She’s planning a return trip soon to explore the logistics further.

Hehre seems to have a knack for connecting with the movers and shakers who can help her grow.

Last fall, Hehre was named among a group that included the likes of actor and Parkinson’s Disease advocate Michael J. Fox and Woodstock co-creator Michael Lang when she received the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Global Citizenship at a gala in Louisville.

She said that experience “was a pivotal part of this journey as well.”

Amy Hehre, a University of Kentucky graduate who grew up in Somerset, received a Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Global Citizenship last fall. She and her husband, Robert Hehre, co-founded OVI Children’s Hospital in Migori, Kenya. They’re shown here at the Louisville awards with their daughter, Lily.

“Every bit of this has put me in a place where I can dream as big as I am dreaming,” she said. “It seems a bit manic for a 27-year-old to think that she can build 888 hospitals, but when you have these amazing people in your corner who are teaching you what they know and encouraging you and connecting you, that’s the power. The power comes from people.”

And, she said, from God.

“A very gracious God who has just aligned all these meetings,” she said. “We have been founded on miracles, and we continue on those miracles.”

Next year, OVI Children’s Hospital plans to open an annex to the existing hospital that will increase its capacity to care for more children.

“We have 17 babies in seven cribs right now,” Hehre said. “We’ve had to build more cribs, build more cribs. But the demand is just high.”

Amy Hehre said the neonatal unit at OVI Children’s Hospital in Migori, Kenya, will be expanded in 2020 because of the increasing number of babies being cared for there. She said this photograph was taken in November.

Aside from providing room for more babies, the expansion will include a modern kitchen, a surgical ward and a cancer and hematology clinic.

“Pediatric oncology services are completely unavailable in our entire country,” she said.

Hehre said she has learned that being herself is important, even if it means she doesn’t look how people imagine missionaries ought to look.

“I will go and dig a baby out of a ditch who’s been abandoned, in red lipstick and a polka dot dress, because that is who God made me. … It’s part of who I am and who I want my little girls to not be ashamed to be,“ she said. “I’m teaching these little girls that they can become entrepreneurs, that they can be the hospital CEO. … You can be an entrepreneur. You can be a model. You can be a successful businesswoman. And you can live in Africa and take care of dying children. There is no requirement for you to be anything other than yourself.”

She said in a recent Facebook video that she has faced criticism from people who have accused her of being a “white savior.” But, she said in the video, “The children are worth more than my dignity or my reputation. I am going to serve them, and I’m going to be the person that God has always called me to be.”