2011 Opus Prize Recipients

Past Winners

Reach Education Action Programme (REAP) - Rev. Trevor Miranda, S.J.
Dr. Juliana Akinyi Otieno
Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos - Rev. William Wasson (deceased)

2005 $100,000 Opus Prize Finalist
Dr. Juliana Akinyi Otieno

Dr. Juliana Akinyi Otieno has always taken care of others. The first of 14 children, Otieno helped her mother look after her younger brothers and sisters. She was on track to become a teacher or nurse until a chemistry teacher encouraged her to become a doctor. It was virtually unheard of in Otieno’s community for a woman to practice medicine, but she was determined.

After medical school, Otieno returned to her hometown of Kisumu, the third largest and one of the poorest cities in Kenya, and set up practice as one of two pediatricians serving the city of 300,000 people.

In Kenya, two of every 10 children die before the age of five, 23 percent of pregnant women are HIV positive. Sick children and their families walk to the hospital where Otieno works to be treated for diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and Burkitt’s lymphoma, an often fatal cancer. Otieno sees up to 50 children each day. She continues seeing patients after hours, working from a clinic in her two-bedroom house. She also cares for eight children at home, including three of her own children and nieces and nephews.

A consult with God

Hospital equipment and medicine are scarce in Kisumu. Parents sleep on the floor beneath their children’s beds. The “cafeteria” offers a small charcoal stove for cooking and an occasional supply of tea. The hospital’s lawn doubles as a laundry room with clothing and linens strewn about to dry in the sun.

What she lacks in resources, Otieno makes up for with limitless compassion, an imaginative intellect and steely determination. Some doctors are wary of getting close to patients who have infectious diseases, but Otieno lays her healing hands on every single child she treats. She draws on a can-do, entrepreneurial spirit to defy death and despair and, with the help of a pipeline enabled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shares what she has learned with medical providers in other impoverished nations facing similarly daunting health crises.

Otieno relies most heavily upon one instrument — her faith. As one of just two pediatricians in Kisumu, she is rarely able to consult with medical colleagues. Instead, she consults with God, and enlists Divine inspiration to help the children in her care.