Helping Malawian commercial sex workers find hope, health care, and a new livelihood

"It was always my wish not to have to do that work, but with such poverty, I was desperate and needed cash," says Stella, a former commercial sex worker in Malawi. PIH's partner organization, APZU, recently began working with a health center in Zalewa, one of the busiest trading centers in southern Africa, and consequently a town that is home to over 1,000 sex workers. The health center now provides medical care and HIV testing and counseling, as well as job skills training and employment opportunities. "I am no longer risking my life," says Stella, who is preparing for her new career as a waitress. Read more.

Water as a source of life and of loss

A team from PIH and the nonprofit organization charity: water recently visited Haiti hoping to learn how water affects poor Haitians in their daily lives. They joined young children and weary women on a grueling walk to fetch water—a hike that is taken daily by the local villagers.

Read more about their trip to Haiti and what they learned.

"What are we doing about global AIDS?"

As the supervisor of a clinic that treats HIV/AIDS patients in rural Malawi, Samson Njolomole sees many sick people. Many don't believe that they could be HIV positive, or are too scared to get tested. Samson's trying to change this.

Read his story and find out a simple way you can help him in his work to spread awareness.

"Give us just two weeks"
After suffering a fall that left him paralyzed for life, Patrick languished in a hospital for weeks as a victim of Malawi's severe shortage of healthcare workers. His bedsores became infected, his body wasted from malnutrition, his will to live dimmed. All he wanted was "to be taken home to die." PIH's partner organization in Malawi knew they could help him. He grudgingly gave them two weeks to try.

Partner in profile: A pediatrician in Haiti
Dr. Jean Louis Romain used to know only story after story of the child who died of meningitis because her family could not pay for the medicine needed to treat the infection, or the boy who died because he wasn’t at a hospital equipped to treat an intestinal blockage. “We would know what they have—we would diagnose them, and then they would be sent home to die.” Today, Dr. Romain works at the Zanmi Lasante (PIH’s partner organization in Haiti) hospital in Cange precisely because the organization offered him the opportunity to practice medicine with the tools and resources a doctor needs to effectively treat patients—whether they have HIV or severe malnutrition—and regardless of their ability to pay. He can now tell a very different kind of story.

House of hope: A new home and family for children orphaned by AIDS and tuberculosis
"It was painful to see them, the wind was so freezing, they were so hungry... [Their clothes] hardly covered their little bodies," Dr. Hind Satti of PIH Lesotho lamented after meeting three young sisters. The girls, who range in age from 10 to 6 years old, had lost their mother to tuberculosis. With no one to care for them, the sisters were forced to beg for food in their village. Unfortunately, their situation is far from unique. The pandemics of HIV/AIDS and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) threaten to wipe out a generation of adults across Africa, orphaning millions of children in the process. Read about PIH Lesotho's new program to help these three sisters and other orphans like them. 

Global health recommendations for a new administration and congress
Following the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, a coalition of organizations dedicated to global health equity, including Partners In Health, came together to prepare recommendations for steps the new administration and new Congress could take to seize "a unique opportunity to redefine foreign aid policy to help those most impoverished and to save lives." Read the recommendations.

To fight malaria, APZU blankets district in bednets
Last year, the impoverished Neno District of Malawi reported more than 52,000 cases of malaria. The disease was responsible for hundreds of deaths—most of them children—and was the most common diagnosis in the outpatient clinics. To tackle this deadly disease, PIH’s partner organization in Malawi (APZU) recently launched a campaign to distribute over 26,000 mosquito bednets to households with individuals most at risk of contracting the disease. Read more about this campaign.

Right to Health Care program brings Haitian boy to Boston
for skull surgery
In a cozy, sunny room on the ninth floor of Children’s Hospital in Boston, 11-month-old Dumanel Luxama happily coos and chortles as his father stands beside him. Just a few days earlier, the little Haitian boy had undergone major surgery to prevent brain tissue from bulging through a hole in his skull. Through its Right to Health Care program, PIH has a history of bringing patients who cannot be treated at local sites to larger, better-equipped hospitals in the U.S. and elsewhere. Read more

Village Health Works: Healing people and communities in Burundi
In 1993, Deo escaped a civil war in his native country of Burundi, but he couldn’t leave it behind. He was consumed by memories of death and despair, and distraught because he didn’t know whether his family was alive or dead. After meeting PIH co-founder Paul Farmer and learning about the work of PIH firsthand, he finally returned to his home country in 2005 with the goal of opening a free medical clinic in his native village. Read this story

PIH news archive