The Sons of Lwala elevate self-help to the next level

This week we will take a slight break from our usual profile of a single individual and his career journeys, to focus on the story of two brothers whom I prefer to call the sons of Lwala.

Fred is a medical student, and Milton Ochieng is in his medical residency, in the United States. But that is not why they are being featured in the column. Think back to that term – ‘Sons of Lwala’.

That is the title of a documentary, which has won awards at film festivals in the United States, about how the Ochieng brothers decided to honour their late parents, as well as fulfil their duty as sons of the Lwala community; by building a clinic for those whose only destination for medical attention was, for a long time, dozens of miles away.

Fred and Milton come from a family of six children, whose home is at the picturesque village of Lwala near Lake Victoria.

However, the village has for a long time suffered from a lack of proper medical care. As the brothers say, ‘we saw first-hand the suffering that disease brought people who could not access health-care, some with tragic consequences.

To get to see a doctor, we would travel about 10 kilometres down an unpaved road, then catch public transportation to Kisii or Homa Bay, another 25 to 30 kilometres away’.

Tragic incident
A particularly tragic incident is one of maternal death during childbirth: ‘When we were teenagers growing up in Lwala, we vividly remember how once, a pregnant woman who developed complications during labour had to be ferried in a neighbour’s wheelbarrow in an attempt to get her to the paved road then to the hospital. She passed away enroute and the bodies of baby and mother were returned to a wailing village on the same wheelbarrow’, Milton and Fred explain.

They say they got interested in studying medicine around that time.

Their parents, both teachers, were pillars of the community. They saw the obvious value in the education of their children, so they decided to provide the best schooling for them, which culminated in both being accepted at the prestigious Alliance High School, a year apart.

This wasn’t without its sacrifices: ‘Our parents, who were both teachers, sacrificed a lot and took out loans to take us to good schools’.

Milton had gone on an exchange visit to Brooks School, in And over, Massachusetts, in the US, while still in high school. The country made a strong impression on him, and the contacts he made there came in handy when he and his brother looked at the options for university education.

Post-Alliance, the two boys who were no slouches in their schoolwork, got accepted into the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Nairobi. They, however, decided to enrol in Dartmouth, one of the top universities in the US.

The Lwala community proudly came together to contribute to their passage to the US. At Dartmouth, Milton took part in another exchange visit, this time to Nicaragua.

‘Milton participated in a cross-cultural programme that brought together Dartmouth medical students, undergraduates and doctors to work with a rural community in Siuna, Nicaragua for two weeks. During that trip the group built a clinic. Milton was struck by the similarities between rural Nicaragua and Kenya’.

When it came time to get into medical school, Milton, who had studied Biochemistry, was accepted into the Yale, Vanderbilt and Dartmouth Medical Schools. He chose Vanderbilt, in the state of Tennessee.