Sons of Lwala, People of the Week

Feb 9th, 2009 3:15 PM UTC
By Chris Scott

By the official narrative, Milton and Fred Ochieng’ spent their childhood tending their family’s cows on the banks of Riana, a silty snake of a river that slices between the hills of their ancestral village in western Kenya, Lwala. Sources close to the brothers, however, have suggested that they spent most of this time playing soccer and learning how to shoot birds out of the sky with a slingshot. I would not venture to challenge the accepted story. The Ochiengs’ performance on the soccer field speaks for itself.

Of course, their athletic prowess does not adequately explain why they were highlighted by ABC News as last week’s people of the week. Nor does it explain why they are featured speakers at ONE’s Power 100 Summit in D.C. this weekend. It certainly does not explain how they built a hospital in their home village that has seen 30,000 patients in less than two years.

Perhaps their story is inexplicable. It is much easier to explain, I’m afraid, stories of African tragedy. Such boys are supposed to be stunted by malnutrition and stultified by lack of education. They are supposed to watch their cows shrivel and die in drought. They are supposed to be listless, with flies resting in the corners of their eyes, afflicted regularly by malaria. When they reach adolescence, they are supposed to die of AIDS. As objects of pity, what’s to explain? You know them already. You’ve probably donated money to their cause.

And indeed, there is some truth in what you know. Malaria was a constant reality in their lives. They were poor. They did not have access to clean water or electricity or other basic dignities. But they were and are driven, creative, smart people, agents of their own destiny. In the evenings when the cows bedded down, they studied by lamplight. They graduated from primary school with some of the highest test scores in the country, and gained admittance to Kenya’s oldest and most prestigious prep school. One of Milton’s high school friends remembers vividly the one semester when Milton was not at the top of the class. When another boy’s name was announced, the class cheered. They loved him, but isn’t such brilliance just another distribution mistake in a world full of injustice?

Milton, the elder of the two, earned a scholarship to Dartmouth College, and back home in Lwala the community sold their livestock to buy him a one-way ticket to the U.S. A year later, Fred followed in his footsteps. They were on a trajectory; they had their way out. But they were haunted by the words spoken to Milton as the community elders handed him nine hundred U.S. dollars to get himself to college: “Just don’t forget us.”

Forgetting proved impossible. A couple of years after they arrived at Dartmouth, their mother passed away after a long illness. When they came home for her funeral, their father, who was a visionary leader in his own right, shared with them an audacious plan: they would build a clinic in the village so that no one else need die for lack of access to health care. He handed them the blueprints and called together a village committee to oversee construction. A year later, a week before the ground-breaking ceremony, he became the sixth member of their family to die from this mysterious and invariably deadly disease — a disease caused by a virus that had already infected over fifteen percent of people in Lwala, a disease that elsewhere in the world was entirely unmysterious and eminently treatable. AIDS.

Milton and Fred were galvanized by his death, and by their new status as two of Kenya’s 1.3 million AIDS orphans. They enlisted a motley array of friends and supporters to raise money, and the committee in the village put it to work as it came in. As the complexities of funding and managing a medical clinic came to light, they founded the Lwala Community Alliance, a joint venture of their supporters in the U.S. and the committee in the village. Under Milton and Fred’s leadership, the Lwala Community Alliance won a crucial start-up grant from Blood:Water Mission (an organization started by an American rock band) and hired a small staff.

On April second, 2007, two years after their father’s death, Milton and Fred dedicated the clinic in his honor and opened the doors. Since that day, the clinic has cared for over 30,000 patients. Over eighty five percent of patients are seen for free, and most of those are children under the age of five. The clinic provides basic primary care for everything from malaria to tuberculosis, and it attacks the most common diseases at their roots through public health outreach. In 2008, through a partnership with another Kenyan organization, the clinic began offering antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, the same medicines that have been available in rich countries for well over a decade. These medicines could have saved Milton and Fred’s parents’ lives.

In 2008 the Kenyan Ministry of Health voted the clinic the best health facility in its district.

The clinic is still overseen by a village committee, and the Kenyan staff has grown to twenty people in the village, including two clinical officers, three nurses, a lab technician, a pharmacist, and Milton and Fred’s eldest brother, Omondi, who is the clinic director. A new facility with a maternity ward, maternal and child health department, and comprehensive care center for HIV/AIDS will be built this year. An education program has sent over twenty young people from Lwala to high school, and two to medical school, in exchange for future service at the clinic. A microfinance program is planned.

Is Milton and Fred’s story indeed inexplicable? The tragic trope of Africa certainly cannot account for it. But perhaps it fits into what my Kenyan friend Moses calls “National Geographic Africa,” since Milton and Fred are wild and bold, like lions. Or perhaps it makes sense in mission-trip Africa, the “their lives are simple but they’re so happy” Africa. What a romantic experience, poverty!

But if you can imagine Milton and Fred as relatively ordinary human beings, smart people who sometimes do dumb things, flawed heroes, great soccer players who occasionally lost track of the cows, theirs would be a story of possibility. Perhaps then our story, the story of our membership in an unjust world, would also be a story of possibility. It is a possibility predicated on respect — self-respect for one, and responsibility, on the part of a couple of young African men and their village. On the part of supporters and friends in the U.S. it is a possibility predicated on respect that engenders humility, and an attitude of listening and learning. The hope in Milton and Fred’s story is not charity, or development, or government. It is community. It is an African community facing its challenges and creating its own solutions. It is a global network of friends coming alongside in solidarity to learn, to listen, to give, and to be changed.

Africa is full of Miltons and Freds, full of Lwalas. But international development practice is built on someone else’s story. There are flies in the eyes of the African children, and they are not just pulling your heartstrings, they are driving paternalistic development strategies. Top-down approaches have struggled to expand access to antiretroviral drugs to rural areas. They did not reach Milton and Fred’s parents in time. But the people of Lwala have stepped into the gap. The Lwala Community Alliance, founded on radical respect and subversive equity, is pioneering a model that builds on existing social infrastructure to provide rural primary healthcare from the bottom-up. It envisions an equipped and empowered grassroots movement for primary health care, in Lwala and beyond.

This last December, Fred went home on vacation from his third year of medical school and led the Lwala soccer team to victory in a local tournament. Milton is a young physician in his first year of residency, and was home in January to work alongside the clinic staff, treating malaria and delivering babies. There are new boys tending the cows down by the river, playing soccer and shooting birds.

You can learn more and support Milton and Fred’s work in Lwala at www.lwalacommunityalliance.org.

-Joel Wickre, Executive Director of the Lwala Community Alliance

TAGS: ONE