Academy honors medical worker.

Byline: JOE MOSLEY The Register-Guard

Winnie Barron, a Brownsville physician's assistant and paramedic who established the Makindu Children's Center in Kenya four years ago to care for orphans in AIDS-ravaged east Africa, has received the International Humanitarian of the Year Award from the American Academy of Physician's Assistants.

Barron was flown from Kenya to Boston to receive the award before 7,000 of her peers at the group's international conference last week. The honor included a $2,500 award to Barron and another $2,500 to her favorite charity.

"So the Makindu Children's Center will wind up with $5,000," said Don Andrews of Sharing Hands, a United Way agency in Brownsville that served as the orphanage's nonprofit sponsor when it got its start in 1998.

Barron first traveled to Rwanda in 1994 with Northwest Medical Teams, an international relief organization based in Portland that was helping treat victims of violence between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups that eventually claimed more than a million lives.

She returned to Africa in 1997 and took a job as a relief worker in an improverished village called Makindu in eastern Kenya. While there, Barron and teacher Dianah Nzomo decided to start a children's center to help the rapidly growing number of AIDS orphans.

The center provides food, medical care, education and housing to the needy orphans.

Barron, who was visiting the Brownsville area this week, will return to Kenya for the summer but plans to end her tenure at the well-established orphanage in September, Andrews said. She will remain active in its local support program, he said.

"She's debating what to do," Andrews said. "But she will continue in the medical field."