Nickhill Bhakta, Associate Member in the Department of Global Pediatric Medicine at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, shared on LinkedIn:
“Recently, my personal and professional life intersected and I’ve been processing ever since.
Last month, I was in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe visiting family and seeing the old family homes and neighborhoods. My parents were born there, my grandmother was born there and I spent a chunk of my childhood back and forth from the sleepy town in southern Zimbabwe.
Fast forward a few days later and I flew onwards to Harare, Zimbabwe for work. We had successful visits with the PS MOH, Zimbabwe GICC childhood cancer technical working group and WHO (more on that later).
But as we were wrapping up the visit, our last stop was the KidzCan Rainbow Village.
If you do not know KidzCan Zimbabwe, they are the childhood cancer foundation in the country. They provide 85% of the medications and a whole bevy of financing and psychosocial support services for children with cancer in Zimbabwe.
All this with the majority of fundraising locally.
That takes me back to the original thesis. Two months ago, my father said he wanted to give back for all Zimbabwe and its people have given him and my mother.
Although he works on our ARIA guidelines (ariaguide.org) which already benefits all countries including Zimbabwe (where ARIA Guide is standard of care), he wanted to do something more tangible.
We talked about options and agreed, KidzCan Zimbabwe was the organization we needed to support.
Last month, after discussions with Daniel Mckenzie, Sheena and I got to cut the ribbons for two new patient and caregiver rooms at the KidzCan Rainbow Village.
The Rainbow Village is a halfway house where families on therapy can stay while still receiving care at the hospital.
In support of KidzCan’s efforts, my father donated to complete the rooms and then had them dedicated in honor of Arya and Divya, my daughters/his granddaughters.
10 years ago, when my dad and I both started working in Sub-Saharan Africa, our first collaborations were with our colleagues in Harare.
At that time, access to halfway housing was aspirational. In ten years, and thanks to the hard work of KidzCan, this journey now comes full circle. To cut those ribbons, with my children’s names on the doors…as I said, I am still processing.”
You can also read:
Nickhill Bhakta Received the Challenging the Status Quo Yvonne Award 2026
