Double Duty

After building a clinic in their Kenyan village, physician brothers tackle child mortality and sanitation.

MILTON ’04 & FREDERICK ’05 OCHIENG

FEMI ALLEN WASSERMAN ’99

NORMAN BAY ’82

LINDSAY EARLS '05

JONATHAN MEYERS ’07

SARAH WEINER ’02

BROTHERS MILTON AND FREDERICK OCHIENG grew up in Lwala, a rural village in western Kenya, where the nearest hospital was more than two hours away. Throughout their childhood they witnessed the deaths of several neighbors who didn’t receive care in time. “The lack of access to healthcare was wreaking havoc on the community—lots of people were dying,” Milton recalls. The failures of the system were brought home for a period in 2004, when the brothers took time off from Dartmouth and returned to Kenya for the funeral of their mother, who had died of HIV/AIDS. The following year their father also died from the disease. “Neither of them had access to antivirals,” Milton says. “It made me wonder if only we’d been a year or two earlier in our efforts, maybe they would have lived.” Those efforts culminated in the 2007 opening of the Erasmus Ochieng Memorial Lwala Community Health Center, named in memory of their father.

Milton was in- spired to bring better healthcare to Lwala during his sophomore winter, when he went on a Tucker Foundation service trip to Nicaragua to help build a clinic for women and children. “If a group of college students could build a clinic in Nicaragua in one week, why not try the same thing in Lwala?” he says. Milton began planning logistics for the clinic, and Fred took charge of fundraising. With an initial goal of $25,000, the brothers reached out to a campus minister, who helped them secure $9,000. Upper Valley residents donated another $20,000. (The brothers have since raised $5.4 million.)

Their father, who taught high school chemistry in Lwala, helped organize the project. The brothers graduated and went on to medical school at Vanderbilt University, where they continued networking, planning and fundraising. Once the clinic opened, Milton and Fred helped found a nonprofit called the Lwala Community Alliance (LCA). Beyond pro- viding healthcare through more than 33,000 patient visits a year, the LCA focuses on community wellness, including public health outreach, education, small-scale micro-enter- prise, and classes on sanitation. “We’re trying to attack the problem of poverty and ill health in a holistic way,” Fred says.

the annual budget for lCa has grown to $1.3 million and supports a range of initiatives. In 2011 the clinic expanded to add a maternity and integrative care wing. As a result, the number of women in the village delivering babies in a healthcare facility rather than at home increased from 26 percent to 96 percent—twice the national average—and the infant mortality rate has been halved, from 60 to 31 out of 1,000 children. Last September they launched Thrive Thru 5—a program to cut child mortality in Lwala by 50 percent by 2016 and ensure that at least 90 percent of local children are fully immunized by age 1.

as depicted in a 2011 documentary, Honoring a Father’s Dream: Sons of Lwala, the brothers continue to live in two worlds. While they work to improve regional healthcare through LCA, they also practice medicine in the United States, Milton in internal medicine and gastroenterology in St. Louis, Missouri, and Fred through his last year of a residency at Vanderbilt in internal medicine and pediatrics. They credit their education with helping them achieve their goals. “If it weren’t for the friendships and connections that we made at Dartmouth, I don’t think we would have been able to realize our full potential,” Milton says.

“My father instilled in us the cu- riosity and the feeling that we didn’t have to settle for dire circum- stances in our medical care,” says Milton Ochieng (right).

The boys’ parents regularly consulted a book to determine if an illness was a headache or malaria.

CAROLYN KYLSTRA is the health editor at BuzzFeed. She lives in Queens, New York.