Inside the ThriveWell Outreach: Three Days That Brought Sickle Cell Awareness to Alimosho
When Osawi, sixteen, was asked what brought sickle cell into his life, he didn’t mention a textbook or a health class. He talked about his dad.
His father had a close friend growing up; someone he was inseparable from, the kind of friendship that shapes who you become. That friend had sickle cell disorder. He was always falling sick, Osawi explained, episodes that came without warning and took more and more out of him each time. Eventually, he didn’t make it. He died from it.
Osawi’s father carried that loss. And somewhere along the way, he passed the story to his son; not as a cautionary tale exactly, but as a truth about what sickle cell actually does to real people, to real friendships, to real families.
That story is what Osawi brought into the session at Igando Community Senior High School. And when he shared it during his interview at the outreach, the room understood something that no statistic could communicate: that sickle cell disorder does not only affect the person living with it. It reaches into the people who love them, and it stays there.
That kind of weight; personal, inherited, human, was everywhere during the SickleVive ThriveWell Outreach – Alimosho Edition. Organized by SickleVive Care and Empowerment Foundation, the three-day outreach traveled across Igando Community Senior High School, Ikotun Senior High School, and the Alimosho Local Government Secretariat; not as a health campaign passing through, but as a presence determined to stay long enough for the real conversations to begin.
Inside the school halls, facilitators broke down topics many students had never fully encountered before: sickle cell disorder, genotype compatibility, climate health risks, and the Sustainable Development Goals. Some students already knew their genotype. Many did not. Hands went up continuously, questions about relationships, inheritance, what a sickle cell crisis actually feels like, and how rising temperatures can put vulnerable individuals at greater risk.
No complicated medical language. No intimidating environment. Just people speaking to people.
Across the two schools, over 300 students were sensitized. At the Alimosho Local Government Secretariat, more than 75 community residents received free genotype testing using rapid diagnostic kits capable of identifying different hemoglobin types. For some participants, it was their very first test. For others, it was a confirmation they had postponed for years, held back by fear, by cost, by the quiet hope that not knowing meant not having to deal with it.
That hope, the outreach gently challenged.
What made ThriveWell distinct was not just the reach but the texture of how it worked. Young volunteers guided participants through the testing process with patience rather than efficiency. Facilitators stayed after sessions to answer individual questions. Community members who came for a quick test ended up staying for conversations that stretched well beyond the scheduled time.
In a country where sickle cell disorder continues to affect thousands of families, that shift in how people relate to their own health information is not a small thing. Awareness becomes prevention. Prevention becomes protection. And sometimes, a sixteen-year-old carrying his father’s grief becomes the person who walks out of a school hall determined to know more, and to do something with what he knows.