Milton Ochieng '04 first dreamed of building the Lwala Community Clinic in his village of Lwala, Kenya, while on a Tucker Foundation Cross-Cultural service trip to Nicaragua during his sophomore winter. On that trip, Milton traveled with 30 other Dartmouth students to aid the construction of a women and children's health clinic.
"My experience in Nicaragua was kind of formative," Milton said. "I saw a lot of similarities in the health care situation in Nicaragua and the situation in Lwala."
Almost five years after Milton's initial inspiration, he and his brother will open the Lwala Clinic's doors on April 2.
At first, the clinic will provide basic outpatient care for adults and children with diseases such as malaria that are easily treated by medication and will give pre-natal care to pregnant women. Employees will refer patients to larger hospitals if necessary.
"The community is ecstatic," Milton stated. "Any time we go back to Lwala, they ask if we came back to open the clinic."
The clinic will eventually expand to provide treatment for more complicated illnesses and will house a laboratory, enabling workers to supply anti-retroviral treatment to HIV/AIDS patients in the area. Milton and his brother Fred Ochieng '05 hope that their clinic will serve as a model for others trying to take similar initiatives in their own communities.
"Ideally we want to bring functional health care closer to people," Fred said. "We have big plans and big dreams, but we have to go step-by-step."
Milton and Fred became serious about the project in 2004 during Milton's first year at Vanderbilt Medical School, when he received a stipend from the university to work on a medical project of his choice. He then contacted Fred, now also a Vanderbilt medical student, at Dartmouth, and the two used connections at their respective institutions to get the project off the ground.
In January 2005, during his senior year at Dartmouth, Fred traveled with Craig Parker, director of the Navigators Christian Fellowship, to a Navigators conference in New York City to give a presentation on the clinic. After speaking for five minutes, the two raised $9,000 of the required $25,000.
"Building a clinic was not something that I would have thought would have been feasible," Fred said. "It all looked really distant until we had the first fundraising event, and then it looked like it was going to happen."
Contacts at Dartmouth continue to play an integral role in the construction of the clinic. Most of the members of the clinic's U.S. advisory committee, which primarily focuses on funding and is based on the Dartmouth campus, are affiliated with the College in some way. In addition, numerous Dartmouth students have visited Lwala to help with construction.
"Seeing the good will and how trustful and helpful people are has been one of the most blessed components of the project," Fred said.
During winter term, various groups such as Dartmouth Ends Hunger sent students daily e-mails, encouraging them to vote for the Lwala project on grablifegivelife.com, a website that will donate $20,000 to the first event with 20,000 votes. Currently, the Lwala Clinic is in third place. John Nolan '10 makes an effort to vote for the project every day on three different e-mail accounts.
"I vote for the project every day because the Nathan Smith Pre-Medical Society blitzed out three to four times during the term, explaining the situation. I think it's a very inspiring cause," Nolan said.
Right now, the 1,500 residents of Lwala must travel for over two hours to reach the nearest hospital. Poor infrastructure makes the trip even more difficult, as unpaved roads become impassable during the rainy season. The Ochiengs also hope to raise enough money to improve the roads leading to the clinic so that it remains accessible in inclement weather.
Orchestrating the project from such a great distance has proven to be a major challenge for the brothers as time differences and the demands of medical school hinder communication. It has also been difficult to function with limited resources, a skeptical local government and a lack of guidelines.
"This is something really new. We are trying it for the first time ever," Fred said. "It's been working well, but there are times that you wish there was someone out there who knew how to do this and could give you the right answers."
Milton and Fred attribute much of the project's success to their experiences at Dartmouth and the College's continued support.
"I couldn't have chosen a better place to go for my undergraduate education. The connections at Dartmouth were what did it for us," Milton said. "Even though it's challenging to work on the project as med[ical] students and from so far away, if we didn't have anyone supporting us, we would have given up."
