NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- When residents of a tiny Kenyan village sold their chickens and cattle to buy Milton Ochieng's $900 plane ticket to Dartmouth College, they told him they wanted something in return.

Eight years later, he's a Vanderbilt University Medical School graduate preparing for his residency. In his home village of Lwala, a clinic he and younger brother Fred established serves about 100 patients a day.

A documentary about their struggles to raise $150,000 to build the clinic - while attending school full-time and coping with their parents' deaths - will soon be screened at universities across the country.

"It's not common to have a couple of village boys come to the U.S. and advocate for a clinic to be built in their country," said Barak Bruerd, program director of Blood:Water Mission, a Nashville-based nonprofit that has contributed to the clinic. "The fact that they were able to bring so much support to their community is amazing."

Before the clinic, Ochieng' says, sick villagers often had to be carried for miles just to get to a paved road.

As a child, he remembers seeing a friend's mother taken away in a wheelbarrow during a difficult labor. Neighbors pushed her for 45 minutes before she died.

The image stuck with him. His father, high school chemistry teacher Erastus Ochieng', emphasized the need for health care closer to the community. It was his dream to see a clinic in Lwala, a village of about 1,500 people in southwestern Kenya.

It wasn't until a college service trip to Nicaragua, where students worked alongside villagers to build such a facility, that Ochieng' started to think his father's dream could become reality.

The elder Ochieng' would not live to see the project completed. He died in 2005 of AIDS, the same disease that killed Ochieng's mother the year before.

For several years, Ochieng' made plans. Fred followed him to Dartmouth and then on to medical school at Vanderbilt. By 2005, Ochieng' was ready to build, except he had no money. So he put Fred in charge of fundraising.

That weekend, Fred Ochieng' raised $9,000 at a conference for a Christian ministry group. But it took another two years to raise the $150,000 they needed.

They were finally able to open the clinic in April 2007, helped by a $45,000 donation from Blood:Water Mission, which was founded by Christian rockers Jars of Clay to reduce the impact of HIV and AIDS in Africa.


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Some of the people/orgs. that made this possible:
85 Broads
Judith Aidoo & Uptown Movie Network
Asia Society New York
Berkeley Covenant Church
Brooks School
Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation, Hanover, NH
Channel 5, Nashville
Children Helping Children and the Richmond School
Colorado High Schools
Crossroads Academy
DanniJo Jewels
Dartmouth College Dickey Center
Dartmouth College Environmental Studies Department
Dartmouth College Soccer Program
Dartmouth College Tucker Foundation
Dartmouth Medical School Dance for a Dream
Sam Edelman Shoes
First Presbyterian Church, Spokane, WA
Senator Bill Frist and the Frist Foundation
Grassroots Soccer
Gratis Internet
The Holton Foundation
MAC Cosmetics
Mac Papers
Bethany McLean of Fortune Magazine
Miles To Go
Nacoochee School
The Navigators
Jessica Perilla Design
The Ranney School
Red Bank Regional High School
Judith Ripka Jewelry
ROANNE ADAMS
St. Joseph's College of Nursing
Systems Plus Computers
Therapy Systems at Private Edition
Thetford Academy and Operation Day's Work
Kristopher Tillery
TRIM Classic Barber & Legendary Beauty
University School of Nashville
Upper Valley Lightning Soccer Program
Vanderbilt AMSA
Vanderbilt Beta Theta Pi Fraternity
Vanderbilt Bishop Johnson Black Cultural Center
Vanderbilt Institute of Global Health
Vanderbilt International Office
Vanderbilt Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority
Vanderbilt Kappa Delta Sorority
Vanderbilt Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority
Vanderbilt Office of Active Citizenship and Service
Vanderbilt Office of Alumni Development
Vanderbilt Pi Beta Phi Sorority
Vanderbilt Programming Board
Vanderbilt REMEDY (Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World)
Vanderbilt Speakers Committee
Vanderbilt Student Government Association
Vanderbilt Students for Kenya
Womenade of the Rockies


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Our nation has not always lived up to its ideals, yet those ideals have never ceased to guide us. They expose our flaws, and lead us to mend them. We are the beneficiaries of the work of the generations before us and it is each generation's responsibility to continue that work. - Laura Bush

God is a conservative -

Ecclesiastes 10:2--"A wise man's heart inclines him to the right, but a fool's heart to the left."

Great story!....

Some may say that America was "used" for an education and then tossed away, but I don't see it as that...I'm sure most people would encourage getting an education here if it means going back and working on causes such as this...

It's kind of ironic though that people like this go back to help save the lives of children who will eventually be adopted by Madonna and Angelina Joilie...

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"You get the respect that you give" - cnredd