Kenya diaries: Building health and hope
By Barry Simmons | October 01, 2006 | Kenya
There's an effort going on across the country to build a health clinic in a tiny village in Kenya. For a year now, it has slowly attracted help from California to New Hampshire, but it all began in Nashville with a Vanderbilt student who had a special connection.
Doctors at the Vanderbilt Emergency room are in the business of performing miracles. But the miracle he’s performing outside of the hospital sets second-year medical student Milton Ochieng’ apart from the rest.
It started with a blueprint for a health clinic in Milton’s village in Kenya. It would be a place where people in the village could finally get medical treatment and drugs. When Vanderbilt heard of his plan, they donated medicine.
When Milton returned home for spring break in March, it was not for a vacation. He went back to Lwala to get his first look at the clinic.
Six months after construction began on the clinic, Milton and his brother, Omondi, were witnessing its completion, and with help from friends in Nashville, health care in Lwala could finally be a reality.
But the clinic was not just a gift to the village, it was a tribute to Milton’s father who died less than a year after his mother did, of AIDS. That is why Milton worked so hard to get the clinic up and running.
\"Wherever he is right now, I believe that we're going to make him proud of what we are doing,\" said Omondi.
And that is also why Milton was so disappointed weeks later when it closed before it had even opened. The money ran out, leaving behind a building, but nothing to fill it.
A group of middle schoolers from New Hampshire, where Milton and his brother Fred attended college, decided to help with thousands of pennies: $1,400 worth.
And then there was 10-year-old Jared Friedland who added $240 more to the pot by turning his birthday sleepover into a clinic fundraiser.
But even the children’s efforts weren’t enough to open the clinic. Milton is still thousands of dollars short.
\"It is in my head. How we will get there is the challenge,\" said Milton. \"It's difficult. But it's not insurmountable.\"
The clinic needs about $37,000 to pay for lab equipment, drugs and staffing.
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