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Patique Collins Finds the Right Fit
Patique Collins has got it going on. She is a high achieving African American woman with an alluring combination of physical besuty, spiritual enlightenment, business savvy, and passion for her life’s calling. The Omaha, Neb. fitness trainer loves empowering people to positively chnage their lives. In the short time between leaving a successful corporate career to starting her own buisness, she’s expertly branded her Right Fit company to grow its client base and to garner media attention. I discovered her through her heady, consistent use of Facebook as a social media marketing platform that gets her name and face and brand out there, not just through the usual promotional methods but through inspiring before and after pictorials and testimonials that demonstrate the difference that Right Fit workouts make and through affirmations she writes and shares to offer encouraging life lessons. My profile of Patique is for Omaha Magazine.
Patique Collins Finds the Right Fit
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally published in Omaha Magazine
In 2011 Patique Collins left a two-decade corporate career to open a fitness gym. Two-and-a-half years later her Right Fit at 11067 West Maple Rd. jumps with clients.
Under her watchful eye and upbeat instruction, members do various aerobic and anaerobic exercises, kickboxing and Zumba included, all to pulsating music, sometimes supplied by DJ Mista Soul. She helps clients tone their bodies and build cardio, strength and flexibility.
The sculpted Omaha native is a longtime fitness convert. Nine years ago she added weight training to her running regimen and got serious about nutrition. She’d seen too many loved ones suffer health problems from poor diet and little exercise. The raw vegan describes her own workouts as “intense” and “extreme.”
She pushes clients hard.
“I really want to help every single person that comes in reach their maximum potential, and that is a big responsibility,” she says. “if you don’t give up on you, I won’t. I will do whatever I can to help you earn your goals if you’re ready to.”
She’s known to show up at your job if you skip class.
“There’s accountability here at Right Fit. I’m very passionate about my clients.”
She believes the relationships she builds with clients keeps them coming back.
“People will tend to stay if you develop a relationship and work towards results.”
Her gym. like her Facebook page, is filled with affirmations about following dreams. being persistent and never quitting.
“I think positivity is a part of my DNA.”
She keeps things fun with theme workouts, sometimes dressing as a superhero.
A huge influence in her life was her late maternal grandmother, Faye Jackson, who raised her after Collins and her siblings were thrown into the foster care system. “My grandmother told me I could be whatever I wanted to be and made me believe it.” Collins went on to attain multiple college degrees.
Motivated to help others, she made human resources her career. She and her then-husband Anthony Collins formed the Nothing But Foundation to assist at-risk youth. While working as a SilverStone Group senior consultant and as Human Resources Recruitment Administrator for the Omaha Public Schools she began “testing the waters” as a trainer conducting weekend fitness boot camps..
Stepping out from the corporate arena to open her own gym took a leap of faith for this now divorced mother of two small children..
“This is a lot of work. I am truly a one-woman show. Sometimes that can be challenging.
She’s proud to be a successful female African-American small business owner and humbled by awards she’s received for her business and community achievements.
Right Fit is her living but she works hard maintaining the right balance. Family and faith are er top priorities.
This former model, who’s emceed events and trained celebrities (Usher and LL Cool J), wants to franchise her business, produce workout videos and be a mind-body fitness national presenter.
She believes opportunities continue coming her way because of her genuine spirit.
“There’s some things you can’t fake and being authentic is one of them. I’m doing what I want to do, I think it’s my ministry. Everybody has their gifts, and this is mine.
I’m able to influence people not just physically but mentally.”
To Tanzania with Love: Mary Williams to Make Documentary on Alegent Creighton Health Mission in Africa Led by Bob Kasworm
Good works come in many forms. So do life transformations. Former Omaha, Neb. resident Bob Kasworm has always tried doing the right thing. This devoted family man has been a model employee and he’s also faithfully served his church and his community. But he took things to a whole other level when after several mission and fact finding trips toTanzania he decided to live and work in that African nation. He made a life-changing commitment to Alegent Creighton Health and its onging initiatives in Tanzania in collaboration with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America to improve the health and medcal care, living conditions, and opportunties for residents there. As the point person for the organizaton’s work in Tanzania, Kasworm will be featured in a documentary that former Omaha television reporter-anchor Mary Williams will be making with videographer Pete Soby. The reporter-videographer team will be traveling to Tanzania in early 2014 to document the project’s efforts. My Omaha Magazine story about the mission in Tanzania and the planned film follows.
To Tanzania with Love: Mary Williams to Make Documentary on Alegent Creighton Health Mission in Africa Led By Bob Kasworm
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in Omaha Magazine
Bob Kasworm
Life-changing work by Alegent Creighton Health in Tanzania, Africa is the focus of a forthcoming documentary from a one-time Omaha television news personality. When former KMTV anchor-reporter Mary Williams and videographer Pete Soby travel to Tanzania in February their main point of contact will be ACH’s man on the job there, Bob Kasworm. whose life has been transformed by the calling he follows in that distant land.
Kasworm, a biomedical engineer and devout Christian, combines career and faith in Tanzania, his home the last 10 years.
“This was never in my plans. I really wasn’t thinking I would ever go to Africa or have a life of service,” he says.
He first visited in 2001 on a Nebraska Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America sponsored trip. He went to evaluate the potential of Alegent assisting hospitals. dispensaries and public health programs there.
The pull of Africa began then.
“From the very first trip there was never a day and rarely an hour when Africa was not on my mind. Yes, it was the poverty and the need, but it was more than that. Somehow Africa just got into my blood.”
He made a dozen or so additional visits in a three-year span as Alegent committed itself to working with the evangelical church and various health and civic partners in Machame, Tanzania. He cultivated and coordinated the growing relationship between the partners and implemented various initiatives.
The organization’s efforts there include training medical staff at Machame Hospital, developing Machame Nursing School, providing nursing scholarships and delivering medical equipment and supplies. Kasworm leads the Homes for Health program that uses local laborers to build new, cleaner, safer homes for residents.
A Homes for Health project
At the end of 2004 Kasworm decided to live in Tanzania full-time. He says it was then his wife “realized that what she thought was just a temporary ‘mid-life crisis’ was something I was powerless to resist.”
He’s since learned Swahili well enough to speak it fluently.
Machame Lutheran Hospital, founded some 110 years ago by German missionaries, is at the center of much of Alegent’s work there.
“We have the hospital with about 120 inpatients and many outpatients and clinics. We also have a Clinical Officer Training school and now the nursing school. There are about 20 homes for staff,” says Kasworm.
Neema, the first graduate of Machame Lutheran Hospital Nursing School
The campus is on a rare paved road. There’s running water (“usually”), electricity (“much of the time”) and Internet access – though slow.
Progress is plodding but satisfying.
“The most satisfying thing is that in many cases if not for our efforts and involvement many would simply not get help. A child with a club foot would become an adult with a club foot. The nursing student would not have had a chance to study. It is not like you can just go down the street to an alternative. There is no safety net. We do it or it won’t happen. We can now point to a number of successes.
“There is such a shortage of trained healthcare workers that our efforts in education may well be our biggest legacy. If you educate one nurse they will care for thousands over their career.”
Machame Hospital
Williams, who interviewed Kasworm on one of his periodic visits to Omaha, describes him as a “strong, driven” man who “sees opportunities where others don’t.”
ACH mission integration consultant Lisa Kelly says. “He’s so embedded in that culture now it’s amazing. He’s definitely a problem solver, which is huge in that country. Everything from unloading containers of things we send to fixing machines to keeping a water source going or getting an Internet connection set up, you name it, Bob is the guy who figures out how to do it.
“He has to navigate what’s possible in the developed world with what’s possible there in that culture and that setting. So you have to think of medicine in a whole new way and what he has been able to do is to bridge that gap.”
Williams and Soby are eager to tell this story from a grassroots perspective.
“You can’t really tell the story without talking to the people on the ground who are being helped and that would start with the patients coming through the door,” says Williams. “You cannot tell the story without talking to all the players – the patients, the nurses, the young women who have a fighting chance now.
“We can’t tell the story unless we go past the borders and see how exactly the people live and the challenges they face every day. We’re going to experience that first hand. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
Mary Williams
Pete Soby
When Williams left KM3 in 2009 and launched her own marketing and media production company she set her sights on telling stories that engage people’s hearts and minds. From reporting medical news she knew Alegent had compelling stories to be told and she wanted to be the storyteller that shared them.
There wouldn’t be a Tanzania story without Kasworm, whose year-round presence in that county makes the Alegent Creighton mission model unique. Much emphasis is placed on building relationships and making connections through ministry and medical mission trips organized by ACH and the Nebraska Synod of the ELCA.
For Williams, who’s only previous overseas assignment was covering local airmen serving in Desert Storm, this is an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
“I’m sure it’s going to be a life changing experience.”
She and Soby expect to complete the 30-minute documentary in the spring.
Kasworm sees the project as another vehicle to foster awareness between Tanzanians and Americans.
“Our experience lets us serve as a bridge between the cultures and reduce misunderstandings. It seems much of our important work has not come from analysis or needs assessment – the work has just found us. I am sure more will present itself.
“As long as the doors keep opening and my health stays good, I hope to continue.”
Joseph Dumba and his Healing Kadi Foundation make medical mission trips to South Sudan
Westerners have a long history of aiding developing nations through mission work. Sometimes though the assistance that Americans or others from the Western world provide can appear to be coming from a colonial mind space and consequently the recipients can be made to feel less than. That’s why what Dr. Joseph Dumba does through his Healing Kadi Foundation’e medical mission trips to South Sudan is different. Dumba lives in the States, with his wife and children in Omaha, Neb., where he practices family medicine, but he is a native of the very South Sudan area that his medical mission trips serve. He was and will always be a Sudanese and he infuses the work that he and his teams do there with cultural sensitivity. In the following Metro Magazine piece I profile Dumba and the work of his foundation.
Journeys
Healing Kadi Foundation
Joseph Dumba and his Healing Kadi Foundation Make Medical Mission Trips to South Sudan
A U.S. doctor brings relief to his African homeland
When Dr. Joseph Dumba leads medical mission trips to South Sudan through his Omaha-based Healing Kadi Foundation, it’s personal. The Methodist Physicians Clinic doctor grew up in the same deprived, war-rabaged area, Kajo Keji County, his mission teams serve. His father, siblings and their families still live there.
His parents were subsistence farmers. As the oldest child he worked the fields before school. He grew up in a mud hut with no electricity or running water. Despite the struggles his folks paid for his and his siblings’ education. Life was interrupted when hostilities between government and rebel forces reached deep into southern Sudan.
Dumba fought in the civil war that forced his family into a Uganda refugee camp. He ended up in a Kenya camp. The war still raged.
When peace came in 2005 refugees returning home found conditions little improved from when they left. Dumba’s persistence to make a better life brought him to America in 1990, where he followed his dream to become a physician. He initially resettled in Tacoma, Wash., where he put himself through college and medical school.
He and his wife, Sabina, a fellow South Sudan native and advanced practice registered nurse, began a family on the west coast. The couple have three children.
Dumba came to the Midwest for his residency. After completing graduate training Alegent Health hired him in 2004 and then Methodist in 2010. The Omaha church he joined soon after moving here, Covenant Presbyterian, did mission trips to Nicaragua he went on. In 2007 he led his first South Sudan mercy mission through Covenant.
He’d long wanted to aid his countrymen. “I was looking for that opportunity,” he says. His resolve grew after his mother fell ill and died in the bush. No doctor was around to treat her. He vowed to help prevent such tragedies. He has by providing care to thousands via the Healing Kadi Foundation he formed in 2009. Its South Sudan clinic opened in 2013.
Last spring, KETV reporter Julie Cornell and photojournalist Andrew Ozaki accompanied Dumba for a documentary, Mission to Africa, profiling the foundation’s work serving what Dumba calls “the poorest of the poor.” The film shows the arduous life of residents who line up to receive care at mobile clinics conducted by Dumba’s team in remote villages. Most patients have never been seen by a doctor before. Women, many widowed from the war and raising children alone, present chronic illnesses from their backbreaking work.
“I think the documentary really did bring some light to how things are,” says Dumba. “It’s had tremendous impact, especially in bringing some awareness.”
He says donations to Healing Kadi are up since the doc aired last year.
The film doesn’t skirt showing how tough things are. Cornell was struck by the contrasts of a country rich in beauty yet beset by suffering and hardship. She says Dumba’s “spirit, calm and sense of purpose” impressed her, adding, “It’s clear that faith guides and directs his life.”
Dumba says everything’s in short supply in South Sudan, even things taken for granted in the States, such as medical syringes and gloves. What’s disposable here is reused there. Nothing’s wasted.
“We’re so far from being able to provide the most comprehensive care but at least we’re there to provide some of the most basic things they don’t have.”
The foundation’s set up a permanent clinic containing everything from x-ray machines to a surgical room. Thousands of dollars in medicines are brought over each trip, much donated by Omaha families and organizations.
In addition to doctors, nurses and pharmacists, the team includes prayer ministry members, mental health professionals, educators, water purification specialists and financial literacy experts.
All the foundation’s work depends upon donated time, expertise, money and supplies. Everyone pays their own way.
“All of us doing this do it on a volunteer basis,” says Dumba.
Healing Kadi hopes to build a roof atop its open-air clinic to better shield patients from the elements. Dumba says the foundation also hopes to construct a patient admitting structure and a hydration station. A longer term goal is building an acute care hospital. Dumba says there isn’t a single intensive care unit in all of South Sudan. The sickest patients must go to hospitals in more developed border nations.
In late March Dumba will lead a seventh mission trip. He and his team. including colleagues from Methodist, will put in grueling hours.
“We work for five days, very intensively, Monday through Friday. They’re long days. We work from sunrise to sundown until we can’t see anything. Then we go back to where we base and there we find patients also needing care, so sometimes we work until 10 or 11 pm. Then we just go to sleep and wake up and start all over again.”
Sometimes I think what did I get myself into because you think you’re making progress and you hit a standstill. But then God opens the door and you move forward.
~ Dr. Joseph Dumba
As the film details, Dumba is welcomed as a hero and his team accorded great respect. Expressions of gratitude abound.
Dumba says his greatest satisfaction is “people coming to the clinic and saying, ‘Thank you for being here.’ The clinic is delivering care to thousands who wouldn’t have had any care at all. They don’t have anywhere else to go.” He knows the missions are making a difference as more and more people come for treatment.
“The last trip we saw about 10,000 patients, averaging about 2,000 a day, and even with that we’re not able to see everybody.”
Patients are required to pay a small fee or to barter, he says, in order to “empower” the people to be self-sufficient in the future.
He arrives in advance of his team to arrange logistics. As a well-placed South Sudan native, he’s able to cut through red tape.
“I know most of the leaders in the country. It makes things a lot easier. When my team arrives at South Sudan airport the appropriate authorities have already been informed and all the proper paperwork has already been sent ahead so that my team can quickly pass through to start work.”
He says his country’s “very slow” rebuilding can be frustrating.
“Sometimes I think what did I get myself into because you think you’re making progress and you hit a standstill. But then God opens the door and you move forward.”
It’s then he’s reminded how far South Sudan and Healing Kadi have come in a short time. He and Sabina have helped put all but one of his siblings through college and all are productive citizens today.
He’a also reminded how simple health care can be.
“It’s like a relief. You don’t have paperwork there, you don’t have computers, all you do is just take care of patients. You talk to the patient, examine the patient, find out what it is, write down the diagnosis and medicine, that’s it.”
As the film depicts, physically touching patients is a big part of the healing delivered. Dr Jim Steier, who’s been on several mission trips, says, “It’s not only the medicine…it’s the people” that stand out.
Dumba says everyone who goes is affected.
“The doctors who go with me come back with a different perspective.”
Trip veterans return humbled by the experience and grateful for what they have. They think twice before throwing something away or complaining.
Julie Cornell was impacted, too. She senses the film she made affects viewers the same way. She says she finds “intensely satisfying” the film’s “ability to move people, open their minds and call them to action.”
Dumba likes that it paints a vivid but hopeful picture of his homeland’s struggles and of his foundation’s efforts to address some of the needs.
To get involved with the foundation’s work or to make a donation, visit http://healingkadi.org or email info@healingkadi.org.
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