Milton Ochieng’ always had in the back of his mind to help his rural village in western Kenya. But neither he nor his younger brother, Fred, ever dreamed they would study medicine at a U.S. university and go on to open a health clinic.
The nearest hospital growing up was 20 miles away from Lwala. Roads were hardly passable during the rainy season. “So people would wait until they were deathly ill before they went to the hospital,” Milton tells Diverse. He recalls one friend’s mother who had complications during childbirth and had to be pushed to the hospital in a wheelbarrow. She died 45 minutes into the 2 hour journey and her lifeless body had to be pushed back to the village.
The brothers grew up knowing something needed to be done. Their father —a chemistry teacher — often talked to his children about how badly Lwala needed accessible health care and dreamt of someday building a clinic for the village.
Despite — or maybe because of — the difficult conditions, people in Lwala looked out for one another. When Milton won a scholarship to study at Dartmouth College, villagers sold their chickens and cows, pooled their resources and raised enough money to buy the $900 plane ticket to the United States.
‘I felt at home with the poverty’
In his second year at Dartmouth Milton, along with fellow classmates and professors, went on a service trip to Central America to help build a health clinic. That two-week trip in December 2001 started a chain of events that would profoundly shape Milton’s life.
Though it was across the world from Kenya, it reminded Milton of his native country. “Seeing the rural community that had no running water and no access to health care, I thought right off the bat it’s very similar to Kenya. I felt at home with the poverty,” he says.
