In this issue:
- Standing, walking, and dancing in Haiti
Last month, we reported on three earthquake survivors who had literally just gotten back on their feet. Find out how they're doing today.
- Coming April 21: Partner to the Poor by PIH co-founder Paul Farmer
A collection of writings by Paul Farmer on anthropology, epidemiology, health care for the global poor, and international public health policy. Pre-order your copy today!
- Join Oprah Winfrey and PIH in New York City on May 9
Thousands of people will join Oprah on a walk to raise funds and awareness for 10 of her favorite charities, including Partners In Health. Find out how you can participate.
- Expanding the role of traditional birth attendants in Lesotho
A new project trains traditional birth attendants as community health workers to combat high maternal mortality and HIV rates in rural Lesotho.
- An atypical entrepreneur funded by an atypical microenterprise program in Peru
How one man went from unemployed and gravely ill to owning a successful Peruvian Chinese restaurant.
- Promises, Promises -- What It Will Take to Rebuild Haiti
PIH’s Medical Director pens op-ed in The Huffington Post.
- Our partner in health: Tom White
How 90-year-old PIH co-founder Thomas J. White’s investments will resonate for the next 90 years--and beyond.
- Plus: PBS FRONTLINE's The Quake; MTV News follows donations in action; Videos document Haiti work; PIHer forgoes education to help Haitians in need; Good Business in Malawi; What human rights mean for a working woman in the Rwandan health sector; and Online social networking.
Above photo: Training community health workers in Lesotho. Read about a new program working to train traditional birth attendants as community health workers.
Standing, walking, and dancing in Haiti
Last month, we shared an inspiring story about helping earthquake survivors literally get back on their feet. A partnership between Partners In Health and Hôpital Albert Schweitzer provided prosthetic devices to patients who had sustained injuries requiring leg amputations.
Staff at Partners In Health and our Haitian sister organization Zanmi Lasante reported that the patients were able to stand with the help of parallel bars almost immediately after receiving their prostheses, and promised that they would soon be dancing.
Watch a video to see how these patients are doing today.
Coming April 21: Partner to the Poor by PIH co-founder Paul Farmer
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Dr. Paul Farmer is one of the most extraordinary people I've ever known. Partner to the Poor recounts his relentless efforts to eradicate disease, humanize health care, alleviate poverty, and increase opportunity and empowerment in the developing world. It will inspire us all to do our parts.
-William J. Clinton
For nearly thirty years, anthropologist, physician, and PIH co-founder Paul Farmer has traveled to some of the most impoverished places on earth to bring comfort and the best possible medical care to the poorest of the poor. Driven by his stated intent to "make human rights substantial," Paul has treated sufferers of HIV/AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru, Siberia, and Rwanda. Throughout his career, Paul has written eloquently and extensively on these efforts.
Partner to the Poor collects his writings from 1988 to 2009 on anthropology, epidemiology, health care for the global poor, and international public health policy, providing a broad overview of his work. It illuminates the depth and impact of Farmer's contributions and demonstrates how, over time, this unassuming and dedicated doctor has fundamentally changed the way we think about health, international aid, and social justice.
Partner to the Poor will be published on April 21. Pre-order your copy today from www.amazon.com. A portion of the proceeds will benefit PIH's work around the world.
Join Oprah Winfrey and PIH in New York City on May 9
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Oprah Winfrey's O: The Oprah Magazine recently selected Partners In Health (PIH) as one of ten organizations to benefit from the magazine’s Live Your Best Life Walk, to be held on Mother’s Day—May 9—in New York City.
The Live Your Best Life Walk was organized to commemorate O Magazine’s tenth anniversary. Over 30,000 walkers and fundraisers are expected to be on hand, along with a variety of television and musical personalities, including PIH Medical Director Joia Mukherjee.
Walkers are encouraged to use the walk as a chance to fundraise for one of Oprah’s favorite nonprofit organizations, including PIH. All funds raised on PIH’s behalf will help support our programs in Haiti.
“Mother’s Day is not only an important occasion to recognize the strength and love of mothers across the globe, but also a time to reflect on mothers and children in need,” said Joia Mukherjee, who will be representing PIH at the walk. “On May 9, we will walk, sing, and come together to show our support, in solidarity and great hope, for the mothers of Haiti and all her people ”
Learn more about the Live Your Best Life Walk and register to participate.
Expanding the role of traditional birth attendants in Lesotho
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Traditional Birth Attendant (TBA) Coordinator Marumo Marumo with four TBAs at a recent training.
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In the small southern African country of Lesotho, about one out of every four adults is HIV-positive, and high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity threaten the country’s young mothers. The rough, mountainous terrain and lack of roads exacerbates the situation, preventing many people from easily accessing the medical services needed to curb the epidemics.
To help address these problems, Partners In Health Lesotho (PIHL) is using traditional birth attendants (TBA)—local traditional midwives—to provide women living in rural mountain villages with access to comprehensive medical care including HIV testing and treatment; methods of preventing HIV transmission from mother-to-child; and as general reproductive health services.
In May 2009, PIHL, in partnership with the Elton John AIDS Foundation, began to pilot a TBA program in a catchment area that includes 71 villages around PIHL’s health center in Bobete. PIHL hired and trained 100 local women to serve as a link between the clinic and pregnant women—who are literally their neighbors. The TBAs locate and accompany the expectant mothers through their pregnancy and birth to ensure that they have full access to the clinic’s comprehensive services. This includes bringing the women to the clinic to deliver their babies.
The TBAs are a part of Lesotho’s traditional midwifery community and PIHL seeks not to replace them, but to further their education and employ them in an expanded role as community health workers in the communities of which they are already a part.
Read more about the new TBA program.
An atypical entrepreneur funded by an atypical microenterprise program in Peru
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Teodulfo and his restaurant, Chifa Todo Rico.
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Teodulfo Blaas, a Peruvian restaurant owner, is in an unlikely position in today’s economy. While other entrepreneurs have seen business slow and even halt, Teodulfo’s business is thriving to the point where he is now considering opening a second location.
Just a few years ago, Teodulfo was in a very different situation. He had been diagnosed with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), a life-threatening disease that until recently was considered incurable in resource-poor settings like Peru. After two years of intensive treatment Teodulfo was cured, but the illness and the side effects of his medications had forced him to leave his job as a laborer. This left the father of five with no income and no prospects in Lima’s tight labor market.
The only viable option seemed to be to start his own business, but Teodulfo was far from an ideal candidate for a typical microenterprise program. His scant resources and recent health history made him seem like a risky investment. Even if he found a bank to loan him some capital, he didn’t have any business experience to speak of.
Fortunately, this atypical microenterprise candidate met an atypical microenterprise program in Socios en Salud (SES), the PIH's Peruvian sister organization PIH.
Read how the program enabled Teodulfo to own the widely successful Chifa Todo Rico, serving up Chinese food with a Peruvian flare.
Watch a recent PBS Newshour video report highlighting another SES microenterprise success story – Oscar Ccencho Huamani, recovered MDR-TB patient and candystore owner.
Promises, Promises -- What It Will Take to Rebuild Haiti
“In the streets and resettlement camps of Port-au-Prince, the promises and rhetoric were greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism,” writes Partners In Health’s (PIH) Medical Director Dr. Joia Mukherjee in an April 7 editorial, “Promises, Promise—What It Will Take to Rebuild Haiti.” The piece was published on the online news site The Huffington Post.
The editorial addresses promises made at last week’s International Donors’ Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti, hosted by the UN at its headquarters in New York City. The conference demonstrated an international commitment to Haiti’s short and long-term recovery and yielded pledges totaling more than $9.9 billion USD for Haiti’s reconstruction, governance, and broad-based sustainable development.
“The amounts pledged to support relief and reconstruction at the March 31 International Donors’ Conference for Haiti were impressive,” writes Joia, “So was much of the accompanying rhetoric about recognizing Haitian leadership and empowering the Haitian people.”
“Nearly three months after the January 12 quake, the scene remains grim. An impoverished city of three million people—long without adequate building codes, sanitation or waste management—has been reduced to a patchwork of ruins and fetid shanty settlements. As the first torrents of the rainy season pour down and the hurricane season looms, hundreds of thousands of people live in makeshift shelters with little or no access to sanitation, many on slopes where they could be swept away by mudslides, others on patches of low-lying ground that will inevitably become a toxic stew of mud, garbage, and human waste. Children remain out of school and the medical infrastructure of Port-au-Prince lies in ruins.”
To read Joia’s perspective on what it will take for Haiti to win the struggle for dignity, and what changes need to occur before Haiti’s people can rebuild their country, click here.
Our partner in health: Tom White
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Tom White visiting Haiti in the early days of PIH's work in Cange.
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On March 10, 2010, PIH celebrated the 90th birthday of our co-founder and partner, Thomas J. White. For many years, Tom has enabled PIH to do “whatever it takes” to make our patients well. Millions of lives have been saved and transformed around the world because of it. Whether financing the construction of a small clinic in Cange (a squatter settlement in Haiti) or investing in the expensive drug regimens of PIH’s first multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) patients, Tom’s commitment to service to the destitute sick and his vision of what could be have changed global health delivery forever.
PIH’s facility in Cange has grown from a one room clinic to a fully functional hospital with inpatient, outpatient, surgical, and specialized care available to patients regardless of their ability to pay. It is a symbol of hope for the poor throughout Haiti. Similarly, MDR-TB is no longer a death sentence in resource poor settings—that initial cohort of Peruvian patients treated with Tom’s investment helped us prove that the disease could be cured, which in turn helped to change global policy.
To understand Tom’s passion, motivation, and drive to help the poor throughout his life, it is best to read his own words. In an autobiography, he writes:
I think it’s important for us to live in an inclusive world. Excluding people for this reason or that is, in most cases, grossly unfair. I also think that the myth of the self-made man is exactly that, a myth. All of us are born under many conditions over which we had no control or no vote, i.e. where and when we were born, whether we were male or female, the color of our skin, our ethnicity, and our religion.
... In speeches that I have had to give in the last three or four years when I was the honoree of certain organizations at their annual dinner, I have always tried to emphasize the following message: - three things – 1) Don’t be apathetic – be involved, 2) Live your life, at least in part, for other people, 3) Realize that there is an urgency to your giving, especially if you are giving to the poor.
Read reflections from PIH's other four co-founders--Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, Jim Yong Kim, and Todd McCormack, and submit your own.
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