Margaret Kenyatta asked her driver to make a pitstop. She’d just touched down in Narok County, arriving from the capital Nairobi amid a flurry of dust kicked up by her helicopter, and was due to speak at the ribbon cutting for WE College. But before taking up her official duty, the First Lady of Kenya wanted to kiss some babies.

This was no political stunt. Kenyatta has long been a champion of maternal health, having launched her Beyond Zero campaign in 2013 to expand access to medical services and end infant and maternal deaths across Kenya. She wanted to tour Baraka Hospital—a health care facility built by WE Charity on the edge of the Maasai Mara—to learn from the successes in the maternity ward, speak with the nurses and doctors, and, yes, greet some newborns. It comes with the territory.

Kenyatta stepped into the antenatal room and greeted a pregnant woman awaiting a checkup. Justin Naiguek, a nurse at Baraka, was preparing to attend to his patient. He’s delivered more than a hundred babies in his three years at the hospital and speaks with authority when asked how the medical services have changed lives. He shared the story of one baby, who, by all accounts, shouldn’t have made it.

Naiguek was on site when the Baraka ambulance rushed Mama S* through the hospital gates. Her contractions had started unexpectedly at her home near the town of Emarti, roughly 100 kilometers west of Baraka. She was just shy of 28 weeks, carrying twins. Babies born at this stage are classified as very preterm and are at risk of chronic health problems. They are smaller, often have trouble breathing, low blood pressure and difficulty regulating body temperature.

In the right circumstances, very preterm babies can survive and thrive. But delivery is complicated. And Mama S had done it at home, with family by her side. The tiny, delicate creatures then required urgent medical care. Before Baraka’s ambulance reached the hospital’s maternity ward, she’d lost her first child, a girl; but her second, a son, was hanging on.

“He weighed just 900 grams,” says Naiguek, who emotionally recalled how nurses carefully cleared the baby’s lungs so he could breath and painstakingly cleaned him. Nine hundred grams is lighter than a one-liter carton of milk. His suckling reflex—the evolutionary impulse that allows newborns to feed moments after birth—hadn’t developed yet. His skin, a brittle reddish-purple that was paper-thin and revealed his tiny blood vessels, couldn’t protect him from the cold.

For 74 days, the neonatal unit at Baraka was his home. The sun rose and set, cattle grazed in the fields around the hospital, students rushed to classes in the nearby schools—and he stayed warm in an incubator, machines helping his little lungs pump oxygen. Tubes fed him through his nostrils. Antibiotics supplemented his nascent immune system. Daily cleaning and weighing were done with the greatest of care. Mama S took every opportunity to hold him, skin-to-skin, so he would know her even before he opened his eyes. And Naiguek took his turn amid a rotating cast of nurses who stayed by his bedside day and night as his heartbeat grew in strength.

Stories like this are a relative rarity outside of Kenya’s cities. For vast swaths of the country, premature labor or complications in delivery can still be a death sentence for mothers and babies unable to access medical services. That’s what brought the First Lady—the nation’s most prominent champion of maternal health—to Baraka. Her organization funds dozens of mobile health clinics, advocates for policy reforms and partners with nongovernmental organizations to improve services in remote areas. Baraka, and hospitals like it, offer hope.

According to the Kenyan Bureau of Statistics, the number of women giving birth in the country’s medical facilities has dramatically increased in recent years: from just over 40 percent in 2008 to 61 percent in 2014, the last year data is available. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Access isn’t equal across the country. In Narok, a mostly rural county in the southern corner of the Great Rift Valley that’s home to more than one million people, just one in five babies were delivered by doctors in 2014. Meanwhile, Kenya has a stubbornly high infant mortality rate of 34 for every 1,000 births (for context, Canada’s ratio is 4 per 1,000).

Mama S’ son didn’t become just another statistic, because of Baraka.

The level of care he received is a point of pride for the staff, an indicator of how far they’ve come, says Naiguek. More than that, there’s a newfound understanding of what the hospital means to the people it serves. “There’s pure satisfaction, seeing them leave in good health,” he reflects. “But it makes you feel like you have to do more for the community. On any given day there is another mother who needs us.”

Doctors and nurses at Baraka are performing more surgeries, vaccinating more children, visiting more communities with mobile clinics and treating more patients than ever before. They’re also delivering more babies with each passing year. Since the maternity ward opened in 2013, more than 1,800 babies have been born at Baraka Hospital, and Naiguek estimates that more than nine out of 10 babies born in the area are delivered there. “It comes down to trust from these mothers,” he explains of the change that’s occurred in the past six years.

It was a leap of faith for many women to move away from traditional birth practices. The First Lady’s visit helped validate that leap.

In the antenatal room with Naiguek and his patient, a woman in her third trimester, Kenyatta asked the soon-to-be mother about her health and experience in the hospital. As soon as the First Lady left the room and was beyond earshot, the patient turned to Naiguek with a quizzical look. She knew the woman was important—the entourage trailing her communicated that—but she didn’t recognize Kenyatta.

“I told her, ‘You lost an opportunity. That was the First Lady!” Naiguek says smiling, recalling the exchange. “She was so happy she had the chance to represent the community and greet the First Lady, she cried.”

As the First Lady’s footsteps receded down the hall, the momentary excitement that came with the visit began to ebb. In its place, the new sense of normal returned, and Naiguek and his patient quickly got back to the checkup.

*Name withheld to protect patient privacy