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.

In the meantime, Fred had been studying Biophysical Chemistry, and later took a year off to do chemistry research in Dartmouth. The two were reunited in Vanderbilt, although things had not been going too well at home.

Their parents, who had worked so hard to get them to where they were, had been diagnosed with HIV and then full-blown Aids.

‘During our final years in college, tragedy struck at home. We lost our mother to Aids on January 27, 2004. She had been admitted to St Camillus Hospital, Karungu. Our sister Flo had to quit college to stay with her in the hospital, so did our brother Omondi’, says Fred.

The idea of starting a clinic had been brewing in the brothers’ minds since Milton’s visit to Nicaragua, and it now became a top priority.

‘After the funeral, the clinic became more urgent. Milton contacted our father to come up with a proposal for building a clinic in the village. Dad, who was ailing at that time, brought together the village, formed a committee and drew up a budget’, Fred says.

‘Milton asked me to be in charge of fund-raising. It was in my senior year in college that I gave a presentation at a Northeast Navigators Conference in New York which brought together 13 colleges. During that event, we raised $9,000 for the clinic.

After that, God led us to places, made connections for us and heaven’s floodgates opened. Children gave their savings, middle school pupils collected pennies and adults wrote cheques.

Then tragedy struck again and we lost our father in May 2006, just a month before I graduated. He did not live to see the ground-breaking of the clinic to which he had poured so much enthusiasm. Construction begun in June 2005’, he adds.

Despite the loss, the young men managed to rally community support to finish construction culminating in its opening to patients in April 2007.

It now provides the community with the service they had lacked for so long.

‘We see about 1,000 - 1,500 patients every month. Most of our patients get free treatment – children under five, expectant mothers, Aids patients receiving ARVs and TB patients. We are seeking partnerships to get subsidized medications, especially antimalarial drugs for children under five, improve the road to the clinic, purchase ambulances for emergencies and bring better technology for patient care’.

Go places
With all this, it can be easy to forget that Milton and Fred Ochieng are still young men saddled with the burden of completing medical school, while still having a full life and co-ordinating the running of the clinic with their brother Omondi from 10,000 miles away.

The documentary, produced by a friend, has helped to bring attention to their cause, although it still has not been shown widely in Kenya (it was aired in Lwala in January).

They acknowledge, ‘we are only novices. There are lots of complex decisions that we have to wade through’.

If what they have managed to do so far is any indication to go by, they are primed to go places: Milton and Fred Ochieng, the Sons of Lwala.

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